Lee  and  the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
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(under construction)

Note: This was one of the earlier "Argus" letters, penned by C. W. Wandell -- see the the Nevada Carson State Register of Feb. 12, 1871 and other regional newspapers for reprints of the obscure "Argus" reports. H. H. Bancroft evidently consulted several such Nevada newspapers when writing his History of Utah.

Mountain Meadows.
Continued.

Blood Atonement -- Preaching and Practice -- War Against Mankind.
Brigham at Bay -- The End is Near.
_______

(Open Letter to Brigham Young.)

Salt Lake City,    
Feb. 17, 1871.    

Sir: The massacre at the Mountain Meadows was simply an effect resulting from a certain cause, which I now propose to notice. And right here I wish to state a proposition, which you will very much dislike to see, but one which is fully sustained by notorious facts; and that is, that the aforesaid massacre was but a realization, on a small scale, of a doctrine before enunciated by you, which had for years been publicly preached not only from your own stand in the old Tabernacle, but throughout the settlements in Utah; not only preached, but a prominence given to it second to nothing taught to your congregations, except polygamy itself, to which indeed it was very nearly related, for as the one was born of an unbridled lust, so was the other of the supposed necessity consequent upon the indulgence of that lust. I mean your doctrine of "blood atonement." Almost immediately upon the introduction of your polygamous practices in Nauvoo did you announce, not publically, but privately, to your "secret police," that it was right to shed blood in defence of the Church and its (supposed) institutions. Upon your arrival at Salt Lake in 1847, the same idea begun to be preached to the congregations, and continued to be so taught for years, and until there became too many Gentile ears around to hear; and in secret it is so taught to-day throughout the Mormon settlements of Utah.

Total Extirpation Taught.

You rejected the doctrine of atonement as given 1st John, II:2, and taught that the sin of apostacy could only be purged by the shedding of the blood of the apostate. You further taught that the killing of Joseph and Hiram Smith had to be atoned for by the shedding of blood, and, in that connection, I once heard you say that there was not enough of blood in the whole untied States to make full satisfaction for their death. The results of such teaching were, as a matter of course, such scenes of blood as were common in Utah before the advent of the United States troops. The New Testament teaches us not to kill; but you taught murder as a precept of religion. You justified, applauded, sanctified, first, the killing of apostates; second, the killing of Gentiles. At that time there were no territories of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Arizona; there was no State of Nevada, but this entire Rocky Mountain region was for the most part an unknown country to all except Mormons, and the peculiar isomorphism of Mormonism was such that you expected to maintain your position here on American soil until you got strong enough to turn your arms against the United States, and revenge the death of Joseph and Hiram. You taught us that in due time the Mormons and Indians were to make war on the entire American people. They were to "go through, tear down, break in pieces, and there should be none to deliver." They were to lay waste "counties, States, and the United States." They were to extirpate the populations in satisfaction for the blood of the Lord's Anointed, Joseph Smith and his brother. It is probable that you cared precious little about avenging the blood of those two men, but you were ruling over Mormons who loved the memory of their illustrious martyrs; you were using them as materials upon which to found your empire and dynasty, and the manner of the deaths of the founders of their faith afforded you a convenient hook upon which to hang your favorite way of disposing of your enemies.

The Crimson Track.

Now, Sir, this doctrine of the shedding of blood had be preached and enforced among the people of Utah for a period of twelve years up to the time of the Mountain Meadow massacre. During that time blood had been shed on the old overland road, on the Territorial road, at Salt Lake City, in the settlements, in the canyons, by the rivers' banks, among the sage brush, everywhere; and all to satisfy the Utah god, incarnated in your person, and portrayed in your treasonable ambition. And in no case has there been a man killed by your orders who was not less a criminal than yourself; no man but had less of lecherous practices, who was not less debauched and less dishonest and corrupt, less a falsifier of his word, and a better citizen than you. Even John D. Lee was, in my opinion, less a murderer than yourself. By the way, there is a passage in Ezekiel, III:17-20, which I commend to your notice:

Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel: therefore hear the word at my mouth, and give them warning from me. Again, When a righteous man doth turn from his righteousness, and commit iniquity, and I lay a stumbling block before him, he shall die: because thou has not given him warning, he shall die in his sin, and his righteousness, which he hath done shall not be remembered; but his blood will I require at thine hand.

As you assumed the character of Watchman, as in the text, whom of all your victims did you duly and truly warn, first, as a preacher, and second, as the Chief Magistrate of a Territory? And on their failing to heed your warning, whom did you cite before your Ecclesiastical Court, and there give him a fair and impartial trial on your stereotyped charge of "unchristianlike conduct?" And then, if unrepentant, after excommunication, whom did you cause or permit to be indicted, tried, condemned, and executed legally, thus magnifying the law and clearing your own skirts? Not the first man, within my recollection. And, therefore, in all these cases, both civil and ecclesiastical law pronounce you a murderer; for the reason that, in the United States, church courts have not the right to try a man for his life; and, further, that their jurisdiction in any given case does not begin until the defendant puts in an appearance before the court, or has been duly cited so to do. Hence, in all your church trials, in which the defendant had not been served with notice, and was not properly before your tribunal, your sentence was without any legal force whatever. Now as your death sentences have been invariably pronounced by yourself as President of the Church, and under conditions as above stated, you are in the eyes of the law a murderer, and are responsible for every death produced in pursuance of such sentence. They are fearful things to contemplate, those secret church trials, wherein men have been tried for their lives and condemned to death, knowing nothing of the matter until the assassin’s bullet had executed the terrible sentence! And yet how often has that thing been done in Utah!

Results of Teaching.

At the time of the Mountain Meadow massacre, the Mormon people had been long and persistently trained to the idea of the necessity, sinlessness, and even piety of church murders. Jedediah M. Grant, then your "Second Counsellor," was your chief apostle of blood and it was in your presence, and with your approval, in the old Bowery at Salt Lake City, he would get up and preach murder by the hour. Incredible as that may appear to the outside world, it was notorious enough at the time in Utah. Those blood sermons, preached by yourself, Grant, and Heber C. Kimball, were caught up by the bishops and missionaries, and preached to the settlements all over the Territory, and the man who would dare demur to them had need to lose no time in setting his house in order, for he would surely die. The scope of those sermons did not only include dissenting Mormons, but Gentiles also. In fact the whole American people were declared to be accessories, after the fact, to the murder of Joseph and Hiram and I am confident there was not at that time a sincere, full-faithed Mormon in Utah, but what considered it no crime against Heaven to kill a Gentile, and his bounden duty to kill a dissenting Mormon, when ordered to do so by you. In such a condition of public sentiment, with the moral sense of the people blunted by your preaching, with a thirst or blood as a matter of conscience and of duty, it only required your order to make the massacre at Mountain Meadows a matter of course.

Legal Inquiry.

The question here [arises] as to what the relative degrees of responsibility truly rests between you and your soldiers who did that deed. Your military order to them was a positive act, while the execution of that order by them was a negative act, and must have been so regarded by a court-martial had one been ordered in that case. And here I respectfully ask our present Governor and Commander-in-Chief, whether such court-martial must not yet be called? Now suppose it should be, and your subordinate, Colonel Dame should plead in his defense "obedience to orders," and should make it appear to the satisfaction of the court, that the massacre was the direct result of such order. You were at the time Governor and Commander-in-Chief, therefore said orders to him were legitimate, though commanding him to commit an act of hostility to a party of peaceable travelers. To what extent can the court hold him criminally responsible? And what is true in his case, must be equally true of every office and soldier in the regiment. Did it ever occur to you that while the militia that served under Major Lee at the Mountain Meadows, have since scattered to different parts of the Territory and Arizona, the commanding officers have remained precisely where they are? That is so, and the reason is evident.

Fixing the Responsibility.

For while the ignorant masses only knew they had been engaged in a horrible massacre, Major Lee and Colonel Dame both knew that they were shielded by your order, and did not greatly fear trial, if one must be had. Do not suppose me to be the apologist of those murderers. The gusto with which many of them entered into that bloody work, and their persistent efforts since to justify the act, fixes their status as fiends, and excludes them from the sympathies of all proper-minded persons. My object is, simply, to bring you, the chief villain in that affair, to the light -- to drag you from your hiding place -- tear off your disguise, and exhibit you to my Mormon brethren and to the government as the champion monster of the continent. Did it ever occur to you, did you think in years now past, in the hated time of your crimsoned reign over the people of Deseret, that the time would come, and you live to see it, when your murderous acts would be stripped of the religious sophistries and philosophism through and by means of which you tried so long and hard to sanction them in the eyes of the Mormon people, when they would be exposed in all their hideous nakedness? when facts would be rated at their just value as special facts, as murders -- and you the murderer? I shall only be too happy to renew my attentions to you at my earliest convenience.

ARGUS.        

Note: Transcription courtesy of Will Bagley and Burr Fancher.

CORINNE.
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ITS PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE.
_____

BY NAT STEIN.

...From Cheyenne the road climbs rapidly and soon enters on a grand pass through the Rocky Mountains, 200 miles wide by 500 long, having an average elevation of 7,000 feet, almost totally destitute of vegetable life, with good water only at intervals of a hundred miles or so, where the Laramie, Platte, Green and Bear rivers cross it, but abounding good combustible coal. From the route in places may be seen the blue mountains in the far horizon. These are principally the Medicine Bow and Uintah on the south and the Wind River on the north.

They abound in mineral wealth, being veined with lodes of the precious and base metals. Their higher portions are wood-bearing, while their slopes and parks and the valleys of their streams are covered with nutritious native grasses. The forests all full of elk, bear and panther, their openings of deer, antelope and sheep, the rivers and brooks with trout and other kinds of fish.

The Sweetwater mines are in the Wind River Mountains, a hundred miles north of the railroad; the North Park mines are about the same distance south of it. Laramie on the... Big Laramie River, would seem to be the base of supplies for the latter; Bryan, on Black's Fork of Green River, for the former. Laramie serives further importance from being the end of a working division of the railroad, having considerable repair shops. Rawling's Springs and Wasatch are also division points, but so far no railroad buildings of much consequence have been built at either.

From Wasatch, which is 30 miles west of the rim of the Great Basin of Utah, the route pursues a generally westward course down Echo and Weber rivers to Salt Lake Valley proper, descending 2,500 feet in 75 miles.


Notes: (forthcoming)

The  Alger  Reduction  Works.

This morning the work of laying the foundations for the Alger Reduction Works of Corinne was commeuced, on Arizona street, near Second, by Gen. Jos. J. Hefferman and George W. Goff, and they will not delay a moment in preparing the furnaces for active operitions. These gentlemen arrived here from the East on last Friday evening to look around and see the ''lay of the land," and already do we find them occupying their own dwelling, and now engaged in the greatest enterprise yet started in our city. We wish them all the success which their energy deserves, and hope to be able to give frequent reports of the precious metals wrought out in their works -- the pioneer silver shops of our city. In a day or two we expect the favor of obtaining from Gen. Hefferman the plans of his buildings and grounds, so as to be able to lay a complete description of the Alger Reduction Works before our readers. Miners at Ophir as well as here in our own vicinity, will rejoice that the ore market, so long wished for, is opening at their doors. The good time, as foretold by the prophet Stein, is very near with its
"Smoke of smelting works and foundries
      on the air arising thick,
And in mills and manufact'ries whir of
      wheels and hammers' click."

Note: The publication date of the above item has not yet been verified.

The Press in Court.

As many as five indictments have been reported by the Grand Jury at San Francisco against the Daily Chronicle, and one against the Alta, charging those journals with the offense of libel. The mission of the newspaper is one that is limIted only by the decency and good judgment of the editor; but in his criticism of the acts of public men and measures, it often happens that vituperation is substituted for just censure and admonition. In the case of the Chronicle we are inclined to believe that, while the jury were governed wholly by the ex parte of the prosecutlng witnesses, and thus compelled to indict, their inquest is, however, poorly employed in the [prosecution] of that journal for libel so far as is itt is affected by the paper's antmadversions on the conduct of Sinton, at whose instance the first indictment is found. He was a publlc officer, the Chronicle a public agent and by the obligations existing between the press and people, was bound to make note of what is deemed wrong. Our recollection of the matter published is, that it went no further than that; and if it be the intention of Courts to muzzle this style of criticisinng the acts of officials, the change will be unfortanate in the extreme. The right of the people to talk of malpractice or ma;administration in their own affairs has always been among the "inalienable" privileges, and we hope it will ever remain in that category. If newspapers are to be circumscribed to the narrow limit laid down in San Francisco, it would be as well to say that the press is no longer free to act with its mighty leverage to aid of the public welfare.


Notes: (forthcoming)

The steam wagon drew well today, it drew a big crowd of spectators... Early last evening the great steam wagon of the Corinne line to Southern Utah arrived from the west on the freight train. It is a wonder of strength and ingenuity and has already been tried as to capacity for hauling. It is now here awaiting the steamboat to carry it across Great Salt Lake to the roads leading toward the mines. A commencement of the vast enterprise of making steam thoroughfares of all the common roads in Utah. Col. Hyde & W. W. Hanscom, the builder, goes to Salt Lake City, to-day, with this useful wonder, and after showing it to the inhabitants of that place will return and ship it to Lake Point, by the steamboat, City of Corinne.


Notes: (forthcoming)

The Steam Wagon.
An Iron Giant -- How it Goes --
The Masterpiece of Locomotion.
_____

Colonel Hyde's grand triumph, the steam wagon or road locomotive, was all around town to-day. At eleven o'clock it started across the track, bounding over hedges and ditches, then up on the north side, where it was guided over toward the water works to drink. Several hundred gallons of Hiram's tank sufficed to slake the monsters thirst, and away it went again. We have described this consolidation of mule horse, and ox teams before but did not see its capering movements until this morning. Why, it appears to swing around in the road, at command of the steering apparatus, easier than a man could turn a wheelbarrow on a matched floor! This great engine will draw its thirty or forty tons of freight in wagons as readily as it moves unloaded. Mr. Hanscom, builder of the car, acted as pilot to-day, and surely his pride as a mechanic must have been fully satisfied in the wonderful work of the Overland Steamer. It is the king of the road in every way. In twenty feet in turns completely around, going at its speed, stops with the touch of a valve, and when desired to move on, takes up its march with a step that ordinary obstructions cannot retard. On the next trip of the steamer, this steam wagon is to be taken across the lake by Colonel Hyde, and there put to hauling ores and freights from the mines to the landing. We rejoice greatly in its success to-day, and while seated on its steady front, close by Mr. Hanscom, wished the glory of inventing and matiufacturing so useful a machine would sometime be ours.


Notes: (forthcoming)

The steam wagon has arrived from Salt Lake City, where it has been giving practical tests of its powers. It goes to Lake Point from here to haul ores from the mines to the steamboat landing. From the boat it crawled its way to land over the shaky wharf with the same caution that any other elephant would. It was there loaded with lumber and coal, for bridges and fuel on a train of six wagons, one of iron entirely, the others ordinary freight wagons. The progress of the steamer to Tooelle and Stockton and its return with a load of ore and bullion are best given from Mr. Hanscom's diary notes taken on the trip. The greatest difficulty experienced was in the supply of water obtainable on the road, some of which could not bo kept in the boiler on account of its effervescing so much. It became necessary to blow out the water several times when they could get better to fill up with. The tanks carried 300 gallons, which will supply 20-horse power four hours, with a consumption of five pounds of coal per horse power per hour.


Notes: (forthcoming)

Her [The steanboat City of Corinne] length overall is 130 feet, beam 28 feet, depth of hold 7 feet, tonnage 300 tons, and has passenger accommodations for 150 persons. She is provided with fifteen-inch cylinder engines of four and a half feet stroke, manufactured by Girard B. Allen & Co., St. Louis. She also contains a water tank capacity of 14,000 gallons, to supply water for her boilers, which consist of two flue boilers, forty inches in diameter and twenty four feet long.


Notes: (forthcoming)

Argus'  Letters.
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During a recent visit to Salt Lake City, we made arrangements for a continuance of the writings of this able correspondent and thoroughly versed historian of Utah. To-day (Saturday) the first of the new series of "Open Letters to Brigham Young" appears, and hereafter one each week until the completest history of Mormonism ever yet written, shall have been given to the world. There are only two men, living, capable of accomplishing the task of "Argus," namely, himself and Brigham Young. The latter dare not write the fearful autobiography, but the other meets the responsibility with a candor that is terrible to contemplate.

---

HISTORY  OF  MORMONISM.
_______

(Written expressly for the Corinne Reporter and containing a
true and succinct account of the Reign of Terror in Utah. -- Ed.)

Salt Lake City, July 12, 1871.    

                               An Open Letter to Brigham Young.

SIR: The company of emigrants slaughtered on the 15th of September, 1857, at the Mountain Meadows, and within your jurisdiction, was one of the wealthiest, most respectable and peaceable that ever crossed the continent by the way of Salt Lake City. They were American citizens -- were within the territory of the United States, and when they encamped by the Jordan river, upon the free, unenclosed and unappropriated public domain, and by the laws of Utah, their stock were 'free commoners' on that domain. The most of those emigrants had unquestionably been farmers, all of them rural in their habits of life; and from the fact that you did not charge them with being thieves, or robbers, or of trespassing upon the rights of others, or disturbing the public peace, or with behaving themselves unseemly, it is fair to infer that they were as upright and virtuous in their habits of thought, and as honest and honourable in their intercourse with others as people from country parts generally are. They came from Arkansas.

When they encamped by the Jordan they were weary and foot-sore, their supply of food was well-nigh exhausted, and their work-cattle nearly 'used up' by the labours of the long and toilsome journey. The necessity rested upon them of tarrying in Utah sufficiently long to rest and recruit their teams and replenish their store of provisions. The harvest in Utah that year, then gathering, was abundant, and mountain and valley were covered with rich and nutritious grasses. What was there to hinder this company from staying as long as they pleased, recruiting their stock, and pursuing their journey when they got ready? And, besides, what had they done that the protection of the law, represented in your person, should be worse than withdrawn from them? that they should be ordered to break up camp and move on? and, worse than all, that a courier should be sent ahead of them bearing your written instructions to the Mormons on said company's line of travel to have no dealing or intercourse with them; thus compelling them to almost certain death by starvation on the deserts? You were at that time the

Governor of Utah,

Commander-in-Chief of the militia, and Superintendent of Indian Affairs, a sworn officer of the United States and of the Territory, upon whom devolved, and with whom were intrusted grave and important responsibilities, affecting the liberties of the people, the rights of persons and property, and the welfare and happiness of all within the pale of your authority without regard to sect, creed, name, or nativity, or differences between individual opinions. In addition to your magistrature, you were the chief high-priest of almost the entire body of the people, assuming to yourself extraordinary heavenly powers and an unusual amount of spiritual excellence. Without any modification of the term, you were professedly the earthly Vicar of the heavenly Saviour -- of Him who divinely discoursed on earth of mercy and of love, and whose last words were, Father, "forgive them!" It is supposable that one in such high position, and with an ambition such as yours, would hesitate to take any step that would in the end bring upon you the execrations of all just men. "Opportunity" is an inadequate term for that which you have had to hand your name down to posterity as one of the wisest, noblest, most humane and best of men; but your evil nature has seemed to inspire your thoughts and purposes, and it is such inspiration alone that must be your apology for the particular course you have taken, which has covered your soul with blood-guiltiness, beginning with that of the manly and noble Colonel Dunham in Iowa, and extending down through a series of dark and fearful years, including in its history the slaughter of this very company at the Mountain Meadows. Not being allowed to remain, this weary, unrested company "broke camp" and took up their line of travel for Los Angeles. Their progress was necessarily slow. Arriving at American Fork settlement they essayed to trade off some of their worn-out stock for the fresh and reliable cattle of the Mormons, offering fine bargains; and also sought to buy provisions.

What must have been their surprise when they found they could do neither? Notwithstanding that flour, bacon, vegetables in variety, poultry, butter, cheese, eggs, etc., were in unusual abundance, and plenty of surplus stock, not the first thing could be bought or sold! They passed on through Battle Creek, Provo, Springville, Spanish Fork, Payson, Salt Creek and Fillmore, attempting at each settlement to purchase food and to trade for stock, but without success. It is true that occasionally some Mormon more daring than his fellows would sack up a few pounds of provisions, and under cover of night smuggle the same into the emigrant camp, taking his chances of a severed windpipe in satisfaction for such unreasonable contempt of orders; but otherwise there was no food bought by this company thus far. And here it is worthy to remark that up to this time no complaint had been made against these travellers. They had been accused of no crime known to the laws, and, undeniably, it had been a point with them to quietly and peaceably pass through Utah, in the hope of reaching some Gentile settlement where their gold and cattle could buy them something to eat.

The Query Arises Here,

What caused so strange and unprecedented a proceeding towards this particular company? The custom of the overland emigration at that time was well known; which was, to provision their trains for Salt Lake City, and refit at that place for California. If other trains could rest and recruit, could buy, sell and refit in Utah, why not this? I answered these questions in a former letter; and shall here recall only one item of that answer, namely, That those people were from Arkansas, a State in which Parley P. Pratt, one of your fellow apostles, had been killed for corrupting a man’s wife and stealing his children. Parley was an expert in the seducing business. He had already broken up a respectable family named Marden, in Boston, and one named Rogers, in New York, besides some adventures in England; but then he was the Lord's anointed! He was the Apostle of the pure Savior, and "to the pure, all things are pure," therefore his inveigling McLain’s wife and children from their once charming home, was a pious and holy act! For that act he was killed by the outraged husband and father, a Mississippian, who tracked them from New Orleans into Arkansas, and there did to him precisely what you have many a time said should be done to Gentiles in Utah under similar circumstances; and to avenge the blood of this anointed lecher, was one of the alleged reasons for your holy (!) wrath against these Arkansas emigrants. Mrs. McLain was living at Salt Lake City at the time the company passed through, and it was reported that she had recognized one or more of the party as having been present at the death of Pratt. Right here I will state the main items connected with Parley’s death, for the purpose of contrasting the manner of that death, and the chances of life that were freely given him by the people of Arkansas; with the relentless, merciless, inhuman manner of the slaughter of this unfortunate company. McLain had followed Parley with a warrant, and had him arrested by the proper officer, on a charge of kidnapping. He was taken before a magistrate, and cleared by the testimony of Mrs. McLain; the substance of which was, that her leaving her home was her own voluntary act, that she took the children from where they had been placed, and that she did not see Pratt until she met him in Arkansas. It was after the examination, while Parley was at the hotel, that some two or three gentlemen came into his room, and in the presence of Mrs. McLain, told him that McLain was exasperated beyond measure, -- that he was certain to kill him on sight, and that his only chance for life was, to get away privately and as expeditiously as possible. They got his horse ready at the back of the yard, and finding him unarmed, offered him pistols for his protection. Parley refused the pistols; but got on his horse and rode for life. But he was a very heavy man; and after McLain ascertained that he had left, he mounted a horse and set out to overtake him.

The Race was an Exciting One.

Parley at the start about a mile or so ahead, McLain gained on him rapidly, and when close upon him fired some six or eight shots; the last one taking effect and killing him.

But to return. This ill-fated company were now at Fillmore. They had left their camp at the Jordan with almost empty wagons, they had been unable to purchase provisions, as before stated, they had but three or four settlements yet to pass through; and then their way would pass over the most to be dreaded of all the American deserts, where there would be no possibility of obtaining a pound of food. What their prospects, feelings and forebodings were at that time, I leave for your consideration; but, sir, I beg to call your attention to the fact that, at the capture of their train at the Mountain Meadows, their stores were found to be inadequate for the journey in contemplation. They were, indeed, well-nigh exhausted, with the exception of two purchases which I shall describe presently, which purchases were made after they had left Fillmore. There cannot be a reasonable doubt that they were already on short allowance when they reached that settlement

Sir, there was that about the treatment which this company received from you and in

Pursuance of Your Orders.

That was so absolutely nefarious, nay, so utterly savage, that we look in vain in the history of civilization for a parallel. There have been times, as in late occurrences in Paris, when men’s passions have been aroused and excited, especially upon religious differences, and still more especially when associated with the idea of caste or race; outrages and wholesale butcheries have occurred; but here we have in free America a peaceable company of emigrants who were forced untimely into a journey, then half starved, and finally slaughtered in cold blood! And this was the result of the apparent action of an entire people. Do you expect the world to believe that action to have been spontaneous with them? That the whole people from the Jordan to Fillmore, should of their own free will, uninfluenced, uninstructed, uncoerced, should all as one unite in denying these strangers the right even of buying food? Impossible! For Mormons, after all, are men, and the mass of them can not be totally lost to the promptings and sympathies of our better nature.

There was but One Man

In Utah that could have produced that result, and that man was, -- yourself. And even you would hardly have treated this company as you did, had not your mad ambition led you into crime. Conscious guilt of multiplied criminalities perverted your judgment, causing you to see hostility in the friendly action of the general Government toward Utah, and red-handed enemies in this company of Arkansas farmers, traveling with their wives and little ones. And they had now traveled through and by fifteen different settlements, large and small, peopled by Mormons under your absolute control in all things, and had not been able to buy food. Oh! what a falling off was there from the words of Him, who said, “If thine enemy hunger, feed him!”

I close, assuring you that you are faithfully remembered by

ARGUS.        

Note: See Will Bagley's book, Blood of the Prophets, which quotes from C. W. Wandell, in regard to Parley P. Pratt, on page 98, as follows: "[the widow Pratt] recognized one or more of the [Fancher] party as having been present at the death of Pratt." In a note on his page 404, Bagley cites this quote from Mrs. Pratt, as coming from the Wandell "Argus" letter, published in the Reporter of July 15th.

HISTORY  OF  MORMONISM.
_______

(Written expressly for the Corinne Reporter and containing a
true and succinct account of the Reign of Terror in Utah. -- Ed.)

Salt Lake City, July 20, [1871].        

                                                An Open Letter to Brigham Young.

SIR: In my last, we left the emigrants of Mountain Meadow memory at Fillmore. Their store of provisions [was] too scanty to allow of delay; and so soon as they found they could do no trading there they moved on, and in due course reached Corn Creek. Here they saw the first kindly look and heard the first friendly word since they left the Jordan. And, strange to say, those friends were Indians! They sold the emigrants 30 bushels of corn -- all they had to spare -- and sent them away in peace. And, sir, these were the very Indians whom you afterward represented in the papers of California and elsewhere as having pursued this company and massacred them at the Mountain Meadows, alleging that the emigrants had poisoned an ox and certain springs which had caused the death of certain of their band.

Brigham as a Liar

This lie, like other fabrications of yours, has done you some service; but the old settlers know it to be a falsehood. There was a company of men who started from Salt Lake City for Los Angeles about three weeks after the Arkansans had left the Jordan. This company had trouble with the Corn Creek Indians. And I am well persuaded that said trouble was another little trick of yours, to put them out of the way. They were driven from Salt Lake City. Some had been merchants there. You were preparing your campaign against the Government troops under Johnson. These Gentiles had to leave. But no sooner had they gone than you received the news of the massacre at the Mountain Meadows. It would not do for them to see the horrible sight presented there, and state the truth to the press of California. These are, as I believe, the reasons why they had trouble with the Corn Creek band, and why the savages followed them as far as Parowan, expecting help from the Mormons to "wipe them out." But Colonel Dame had got an overdose of your Mormonism. He had sickened on the massacre, so most of this company were saved, but were not allowed to go by the way of the Meadows. They were compelled to make a rough and tedious detour via Washington settlement, avoiding the Meadows, so that when they arrived at Los Angeles they could give no certain intelligence concerning the massacre. There is not a particle of evidence to how that any Corn Creek Indian was in Lee’s fight with the emigrants.

The Trials of the Emigrants.

The Arkansas company passed on from Corn Creek, and, reaching Beaver, they found the same order of non-intercourse, the same prohibition as to trading as before; and, passing on, they came to Parowan, but were not permitted to enter the town. Now be it known, and the books will show, that the General Government had paid twenty-five thousand dollars in gold coin for the surveying and opening of this road which passed directly through the town of Parowan, and upon which this company was travelling and had travelled all the way from Salt Lake City, passing through American Fork, and all the principal settlements on the route. They had passed through those settlements without let or hindrance; but here they were forced to leave the public highway and pass around the west side of the fort wall. When they reached the stream abreast of the town they encamped, and tried, as before, to trade for food and fresh cattle, but failed. There was a little Englishman who was determined to sell them some provisions; but Bishop Lewis's son and Counsellor advanced before him, and, pressing the edge of a bowie-knife against his throat, compelled him to retreat without realizing his humane intentions. There was a grist-mill at Parowan, the first the company had "struck" since they left Corn Creek. They made application to have the corn ground which they had bought of the Indians, but were flatly refused.

A Pertinent Question.

Now, sir, why were these emigrants refused permission to enter and pass through Parowan? However unpleasant it may be to you, this question will probably yet be asked in such form and by such authority that you will feel constrained to answer. You are quite competent to give the answer, so is your Aide-de-camp and Brigadier-General, George A.   So is Wm. H. Dame, the Colonel of the regiment forming a part of the militia under your supreme command -- that same regiment that afterward fell upon that same unoffending company at Mountain Meadows and destroyed them. But you will not answer until compelled. Then let me suggest that Parowan was the legitimate headquarters of that particular regiment; that it was the place of residence of Col. Dame; that there was a certain military appearance inside the walls that it would not be prudent for the emigrants to see or [suspect], for their destruction had been decreed, and they must be taken at a disadvantage. And, further, the emigrants hitherto had encountered only a passive hostility, now it was to be active; and they must not be permitted to enter the town where their unoffending manners and quiet deportment might win upon the sympathies of the people.

A Seeming Favor.

The emigrants made their way to Cedar City, at that time the most populous of all the towns in Southern Utah. Here they were allowed to purchase fifty bushels of tithing wheat, and to get the same, and also the corn, ground at John D. Lee's mill[s]. No thanks, however, for this seeming favour; for the authorities that pretended to sell that wheat knew that they would have the most of it back in less than a week; at least they knew that it would never leave the Territory. But, waiving that, still this company of one hundred and twenty souls, or thereabouts, had not to exceed forty-nine hundred pounds of provisions, less than forty days' rations, all told, to take them to San Bernardino, in California.

Opinion of an Old Pioneer.

Now, sir, I have consulted with one of the old pioneers of the road from Cedar City to the Mojave river, one whose judgment and experience are worthy of respect; one who saw that company in Utah as they were passing along on the Territorial road, and knew the condition of their teams. I asked him how long it would have taken them to go from Cedar to the Mojave? He reflected, then answered, "Sixty days." From there to San Bernardino would have taken six to ten days. Here was a company made up of men, women and children, with at least one child to be born on the road, whose mother would require a little rest and at least some comfort, forced to undertake this journey under circumstances beyond their control, but altogether under yours, who were obliged to put themselves on short allowance on the start. Think of that, sir, and say, whose fault it was! But methinks I hear you say, "We did not mean to starve them. We had intended to provide so bountifully at the crossing of the Clara, that they would hunger and thirst no more forever."

A Home Thrust.

Brigham Young, never in the history of our country was a company of peaceable travelers so thoroughly and persistently outraged as was this all the way from Salt Lake City to Cedar. The chief wonder is, how they managed to keep their indignation within the bounds of resistance. Yet they did succeed in keeping their temper; and in no known instance did they transcend the limits of the strictest propriety. During their journey to Cedar, and upon their arrival there, no person had been killed or suffered harm; they had stolen nothing, they had not meddled with your concerns, had created no riots, and, indeed, their whole conduct had been inoffensive and irreproachable, except the, to you, unpardonable offense of giving shelter and passage to at least one apostate Mormon. Do not be impatient, sooner than you wish, you shall [hear] again from

ARGUS.              

Notes: (forthcoming)

HISTORY  OF  MORMONISM.
_______

(Written expressly for the Corinne Reporter and containing a
true and succinct account of the Reign of Terror in Utah. -- Ed.)

Salt Lake City, July 27, 1871.    

                              An Open Letter to Brigham Young.

SIR: The Arkansas company remained at Cedar City but one day, and then started on that fatal trip which was but too soon to come to a tragic and sanguinary end. And here I will state a fact well known at Cedar City and Pinto Creek, to prove that I have not overdrawn the picture when speaking of the jaded and worn-out condition of their teams.

The Militia start on their Bloody Errand.

It took them three days to go to Iron Creek, a distance of only twenty miles. The distance from Iron Creek to the Meadows, about fifteen miles, was made in two days. The morning they left Iron Creek, the fourth after leaving Cedar, your militia took up their line of march in pursuit of them, intending to make the assault at the "Clara Crossing" -- your militia! you, Brigham Young, were at that very time Governor of Utah, and Commander-in-Chief of the military forces of the Territory, and were drawing your salary as such from the treasury of the United States.

The Militia called out by Order.

These soldiers did not come together by chance. Indeed, sir, it is on oath, and witnessed by the seal of the court, that the calling out of those troops "was a regular military call from the superior officers to the subordinate officers and privates of the regiment." And said sworn testimony further states that "said regiment was duly ordered to muster, armed and equipped as the law directs, and prepared for field operations." I am fully aware, sir, of the fearful import of these quotations quotations, and how clearly and inevitably they point to you; yet, nevertheless, they are those which you cannot impeach, neither dare you gainsay or deny before a competent tribunal. How the order to make war on these emigrants passed from your office to the hands of Colonel Dame I have already suggested.

The Court that Condemned the Emigrants.

It is enough here to know that the aforesaid call to arms was the result reached by a regular military council, held in the town of Parowan, at which were present, President Isaac C. Haight (the Mormon High-Priest of Southern Utah), Colonel Dame, Major John D. Lee, and your fat Aide-de-Camp. By the way, when Gen. George A. received the express at Parowan giving an account of the "fight" and its horrid conclusion, he hurried back to you as fast as horse flesh could haul such a mountain of lye and soapgrease, arriving at Salt Lake so badly frightened that, tradition has it, "even his toe nails curled backward," and have been growing the wrong way ever since, to his very great discomfort!

John D. Lee commands the Troops.

The regiment camped at Cedar City -- was commanded by its Major, John D. Lee (who was also your Indian Agent for Southern Utah), and marched from that place in pursuit of the emigrants. It was accompanied by baggage wagons, and, with the exception of artillery, the other necessary "make-up" of a military force in the field. Lee had extended an invitation to the Piede Indians to accompany him; and with these auxiliaries he had a force which the poor, hungry emigrants could not hope to resist.

Attack on the Emigrants.

The emigrants were overtaken at the Mountain Meadows. Being entirely ignorant of the danger so near them, they "rolled out" from camp in a careless matter-of-course way, on the morning of the 12th of September, and as soon as the rear wagon had got a safe distance from the spring, the Indians, unexpectedly to Lee, commenced firing. The emigrants were taken completely by surprise. It is conclusive beyond a doubt, from the loose and unguarded manner of their travelling, that they had no idea of the military expedition sent against them until they saw and felt it. Yet, unguarded as they were at the moment of the attack, they had travelled too far over roads infested with Indians to become confused. They immediately corralled their wagons and prepared for defence, fortifying as best they could; but, alas! they were too far from water,

A Desperate Resistance.

They fought your troops all that day and all the nest. Major Lee, beginning to think that he had waked up the wrong passengers, sent to Cedar City and Washington for re-inforcements, which were at once raised and forwarded, forming a junction with the main body on the morning of the fourth day's fight. This call for reinforcements took every able-bodied man from Washington, and all but two from Cedar City.

Two Little Girls Shot.

During the third day's battle it became a necessity with the emigrants to get water. They were choking with thirst, and without water they could hold out but little longer. There it was in abundance, in plain sight, but covered by the rifles of your troops. They made several desperate but fatal and unsuccessful efforts, and finally, hoping there might be some little of humanity remaining with the Mormons, they dressed, two little girls in white, and started them with a bucket toward the spring. Your soldiers shot them down!

Orders from Headquarters.

On the next morning, the reinforcements having arrived, Major Lee massed his troops at a point about half a mile from the emigrants' fort, and there made them a speech, during which he informed them that (I quote from a sworn statement) his orders from headquarters were, "To kill the entire company except the children!" Now, sir, as to whether those "headquarters" were located in your office at Salt Lake City, or at Parowan, is a matter to be settled between you and Colonel Dame; and, if I am not mistaken, you will yet have to settle it. If Colonel Dame shall ever confess before a proper tribunal that he issued that extraordinary order on his own responsibility, and independently of you, I shall be very much mistaken. But, of the fact that such an order was actually made, there can be no doubt. There had been two military councils held in Parowan -- one before or about the time the emigrants passed that place, and one on the day they left Cedar. Haight and Lee were at both these councils, and from the last returned together to Cedar -- the latter to take command of the troops, and the former to stand prepared to render him any service which might be needed.

Brigham Young Directly Responsible for the Massacre.

It is on oath, sir, that it was at Cedar City, two days after the emigrants had left, that President Haight said to certain parties (who shall be nameless here), "that he had orders from headquarters to kill all of said company of emigrants except the little children!" This fixes the fact beyond dispute that Lee and Haight were professedly acting under orders from headquarters; and to suppose that such profession was false -- that two subordinates should take upon themselves the responsibility of such a bloody affair, professedly in your name, and yet without your authority -- is out of the question. It is equally absurd to suppose that said order originated with Colonel Dame. All the reasons are against such a supposition. Besides, no colonel of a regiment would have the right or the authority to do anything in such premises except to promulgate and enforce the order of his superior officer. To do otherwise would be to subject himself to the eventualities of a military court; and it is certain that neither Colonel Dame nor Major Lee was ever court-martialled for his action in the military operations at the Mountain Meadows.

Negotiating Terms of Surrender.

After Major Lee had announced that fatal order to his troops, and instructed them as to how he intended to carry it out, "he sent a flag of truce into the emigrants' fort, offering to them that if they would lay down their arms he would protect them." This was on the 15th [sic - 11th?] day of September, and the fourth since the battle, or, rather, siege had begun. You will not forget that the little band of Arkansans were not "whipped." Though well-nigh exhausted with fatigue and loss of sleep, and burning up with thirst, they were not conquered, they were fighting for their wives and little ones more than for themselves, else, at any time, under cover of the darkness, they could have formed in solid column, broke through your lines and escaped. But to their honour, be it said, they refused life when associated with the condition of deserting their families.

The White Flag.

But the flag of truce came into their little fort: that white flag held by all civilized nations and peoples, from time immemorial, as an emblem at once of peace, of truth, of honor. By the message accompanying this flair, they were promised protection. Alas, that it should prove to be "such protection as vultures give to lambs!" But the message was not from Indians, it was from Major Lee, a regularly constituted officer of the military forces of the Territory of Utah, one of the Territories of the United States. What should they do but believe its promise? They marched out of their little fort, laid down their arms, marched up to the spring where Lee stood, and placed themselves under his protection; and his promises of protection were yours.

A Scene of Blood Baffling Description.

But now was to be enacted one of those scenes which the pen is inadequate to describe, and the horrors of which it is impossible for one not not then present to realize. Here were unarmed, unresisting men, innocent and inoffensive women, and helpless children, none of which had ever harmed you, or offended the majesty of the laws of Utah. They had every possible claim not only to Lee’s protection, but to life, liberty and their property; Their right to be treated truthfully, honorably and humanely was perfect. But, sir, your order was practically as irrevocable as it was terrible. And it would not do for the troops to think long about it, lest conscience should assert rights which even the thought of you could not overcome. There must be no time for parleying between obedience to you, and duty to humanity. So, without allowing these famishing prisoners time even to refresh themselves, the women and children were separated from their husbands and fathers, and started on ahead toward Cedar City, the men following immediately in their rear, and all guarded by the entire command, with Lee at the head of the column. There is no reason to suppose that up to the moment of the massacre, the emigrants thought they were going to be shot down. After they had been marched about a half mile, Lee gave the word to "halt;" then immediately the command to "shoot them down" was passed down the column, and before the poor emigrants could realize their situation the first volley was delivered! Then from the survivors went up such a piercing, heart-rending scream! -- such a shriek of blank dispair! -- then the flight of all except one young woman, who sprang to Lee, and clinging to him for protection -- then the chase -- then another volley -- and then another -- and still another, and then -- all was still! save the last death strugglings of the unhappy victims, the cries of the remnant of little ones who had been left behind in the flight, and the heavy breathings of soldiers, pale, trembling and aghast at the horrid scene before and around them! BRIGHAM YOUNG, THAT WAS YOUR DOING!

Reflection over the Innocent Dead.

And now, O, ye slaughtered ones! where are all those bright hopes and joyous anticipations which so lately animated and delighted you? Gone! all gone! with the last pulsations of that precious life which friends have taken, but which no contrition, no repentance can enable them to restore? Was it for this that you left your pleasant homes in the sunny south, and braved the discomforts and dared the perils of long months of travel over the American Desert? What sins had you committed, that you should make so fearful an expiation? -- that you should lie there baptized in your own blood? Methinks I hear you answer with your last grasp [sic - gasp], "This was Brigham Young’s doings!" Sir, no explanations can relieve you from the charge of responsibility in this bloody matter. No man who knows you, and has a fair idea of your doctrines and "policy" can doubt. You stand condemned before the bar of an enlightened public opinion. Now go, and in the presence of assembled multitudes put on that regal bearing, with face smoothly shaven, your toilet scrupulously exact, your person arrayed in broadcloth and fine linen -- wear that bland yet patronizing smile, and speak as though you were the very oracle of the Almighty, yet, sir with it all, a brand worse than Cain’s is upon you! You cannot hide it! It is plastered all over you in hideous, gory characters, and is pendant at your finger ends in great drops of blood!

ARGUS.        

Note 1: Transcription from J. H. Beadle Scrapbook, Utah Historical Society --- courtesy of Will Bagley and Erin Jennings.

Note 2: On this same day, the 77th issue of the Corinne Daily Journal was published. It contained no news regarding the 1857 massacre, John D. Lee, etc.

A skeleton, exhumed from the ground at Corinne, July 25th, has created a sensation among the people here... Dr. Munckton, principal owner of the Danderberg mine, at Carson, Nev., is arranging to put the mine up at a grand lottery.... The first twenty miles of the Utah Southern Railroad is located and let. The contractor's work is going ahead as fast as possible.... R. O. Bailey, of Montana, on yesterday purchased several hundred head of cattle from our fellow-citizen, Alex. Toponce.


Notes: (forthcoming)

HISTORY  OF  MORMONISM.
Closing Scenes at the Mountain Meadow Massacre.
_______

(Written expressly for the Corinne Reporter and containing a
true and succinct account of the Reign of Terror in Utah. -- Ed.)

Closing Scenes at the Mountain Meadow Massacre -- The Crowning Horror -- The Bodies of the Female Victims Stripped Naked and Left Lying in the Sun -- Two More Children Murdered -- What Became of the Spoils -- Meeting of the Executioner and the Plotter -- The Grief of Brigham Over the News -- Lee Gloating Over the Massacre -- He is Rewarded for His Bravery by Four Additional "Wives" -- A Summing Up -- The Crime Fixed, Etc.

Salt Lake City, Aug. 3, 1871.    

                                              An Open Letter to Brigham Young.

SIR: One would suppose that your soldiers at the Mountain Meadows, having completed the slaughter of the poor emigrants, would have been satisfied. But, sir, they were not. Another scene was now to be enacted so utterly revolting to our sense of modesty, so grossly at variance with all our ideas of propriety, so altogether repulsive to the better qualities of human nature, that it vies even with the massacre itself in damnable wickedness. This remark is not intended to apply to all of the troops, for it is just and fair to understand that many a man was mustered in that regiment sorely against his will. But apparently a majority of them took to the whole work of the campaign with willing earnestness, and finally returned home seemingly without remorse. And, as good Utah Mormons, why should they not? Why should they not slay upon the right hand and upon the left, until they could wade in the gore of apostates and Gentiles, and then return home singing hosannas to God and the Lamb? They had been taught from your pulpits to expect and to do just such things. The carnage around them was simply a matter of course. It was but an episode in what was yet to be the gory history of the Kingdom of God. It was but a faint realization of those glorious campaigns when they should go through the United States "like a lion among the flocks of sheep, treading down, breaking in pieces, with none to deliver, leaving the land desolate and without an inhabitant." It was for these (your) soldiers, these demons to commit the last outrage upon their victims. Among the slain there was the nursing babe which the mother could not forsake, even in death; there were females of all ages, from budding girlhood to the prime of life; there was also the youth and the strong man. Those females were not abandoned characters; they had not unsexed themselves by whoredom; they were the chaste, the modest, virtuous and pure-hearted daughters, sisters and wives of the emigrants. Well, sir, your soldiers, with many a coarse, ribald, vulgar jest, with many an obscene, beastly remark, stripped them entirely of their clothing, and the whole company were left nude and stark, and without burial! Even the young maiden, who had implored Lee for her life, was found among the sage-brush with her throat cut, and stripped naked!

The order had been given to spare the little children; but in the excitement of the massacre some were killed. Seventeen, however, were saved. They were taken care of by Bishop Smith, who had been detailed by Major Lee before the massacre for that purpose. In this labour of mercy he was voluntarily assisted by John Willis and Samuel Mardy. The hapless orphans were put into two regimental baggage-wagons and taken to Jake Hamlin's rancho, and the next day to Cedar City, where they were distributed among the Mormon families. Two of these children afterward made some remarks which were thought dangerous, and they were privately taken out and -- buried! After the administration in Utah had changed hands, they were gathered up by the Government and sent to St. Louis. The troops at the Meadows, having stripped the bodies of the dead, gathered the stock, and Lee took possession of the wagons and their contents, and also the stock. He had barely time to dole out a moiety to his Indian auxiliaries, put the remainder in safe-keeping, and start with the tithing for Salt Lake City, there to meet you an the assembled thousands of Israel in holy communion at the regular Semi-annual Conference, on the 6th of October! Here was to be a meeting between you and Lee -- between the Governor of Utah and the commander of the Territorial militia at the Mountain Meadows -- between you as Superintendent of Indian Affairs and John D. Lee, your duly appointed Indian Agent, who had just been leading the Indians within his charge in a fatal attack upon a large company of peaceable travelers on the public highway. And, sir, your action at this meeting was to fix irrevocably the fact of your innocence or guilt. Did you, as it was your bounden duty to do, have that man arrested by a military order, and court-martialed? Or did you have your Indian Agent arrested and tried? Sir, you did neither, and for the only possible reason that you dared not do it. Instead of doing that which every consideration of duty and of justice bound you to do, you introduced a little ridiculous by-play. It is said you "cried" and "threw down that tithing gold." Out, I say, upon such contemptible subterfuge! Sir, in my opinion, you have never shed an honest tear since the last time your mother spanked you for lying! And you threw away that gold, did you? Well, sir, who picked it up again Pshaw! I guess the door of that big safe was open when you threw away that gold! Not only did you fail as a civil and a military officer in your duty to Lee; but the General Conference of your church was about to assemble, and then and there it was your duty to charge him with unchristianlike conduct in the affair at the Mountain Meadows -- to cut him off from the Church, and hand him over to the proper authorities for trial. You did not do it, because you did not dare to! Yet he had reported to you, and you had not the plea of ignorance to excuse you. In the language of a sworn witness, Lee "reported fully to the President (meaning you) the fight at Mountain Meadows and the killing of the emigrants." This fiend during his journey to meet you and the brethren at the conference, fully portrayed his dark and hellish nature. He stopped at the settlements, and with great apparent glee recited the history of his doings at the Meadows. He was particularly jubilant over the massacre; and facetiously tried to mimic what he called "the squealing of the women!" At the conference you did not even charge him with doing wrong. How, sir, do you account for that? You did not even wish to do so, and as you imagined there would be no end to your supremacy in Utah, you supposed you could afford to take no notice of him. The result was, that you received Lee in his official capacities as Major and Indian agent, and you sent him away as such. It was then and there you turned over to him as Indian Agent the property of the slaughtered company, authorizing him to make such disposition of the same as he might think best. Not long after that you sealed a woman to him in polygamy. And all Mormons know that no man can enjoy that "privilege" whose standing in the church is not good, and who is not fully fellowshipped. Lee already had twelve women when you sealed this last to him. The very next season you sealed another to him; and the next, another; and after that another. You have sealed four polygamous wives to John D. Lee since the Mountain Meadow massacre! and when public sentiment in Southern Utah began to turn pretty strongly against him, you came to his rescue in a public discourse, in which you are reported by good Mormons to have said that he "was the most perfect gentleman in the South." So much for what you have done for John D. Lee since the date of the massacre.

Now let us see how all this matter stands. You continued in the Gubernatorial office until superceded by Governor Cumming, fully one-third of a year after the aforesaid massacre had been officially reported to you by Lee. Yet, in all that time, you, as Commander-in-Chief, neither court martialed him, nor promulgated any order of censure or disapproval of his aforesaid military operations.

In all that time, you, as Governor of Utah, failed to institute a military court of Inquiry in the Mountain Meadow affair, and particularly with regard to his action therein, although you knew officially that he had employed a part of the military forces of the Territory in making an unprovoked and unlawful war upon citizens of the United States.

In all that time, you, as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, failed to call him to an account as Indian Agent for his action in employing the savages within his agency, himself leading them, in making a barbarous and fatal attack upon peaceable emigrants traveling at the time within the geographical limits of his jurisdiction.

In all that time, AND FOR NEARLY FIFTEEN YEARS THEREAFTER, you, as the Chief President of the Mormons sect in Utah, did neither try him for his fellowship, or censure him for his conduct in attacking and murdering a company of emigrant families on the public highway.

Sir, did you ever consider how your action, as also your non-action, in this matter would look in after years, when the fitting time should come to present the same to you for your reading? Did you ever consider that the time would come when the recital, even in this brief and imperfect manner, of the crimsoned tale of the Mountain Meadows, would stir the hearts of men, aye, to the depths? Are you now living in the hope that in the influx of sundry populations -- in the great prospective increase of business -- in the mania for hunting up our mines -- in the multiplying in our midst of civil and religious societies and orders -- and, more than all else, in your new-born bastard-liberal and loyal seeming, that the multitude of your murderers, and, more especially, the fiendish massacre of the Arkansas emigrants will be forgotten? Is the rule to apply in your case, "That old debts are seldom paid, and old crimes never punished?" Are the wheels of the steam wagon, as they roll over our highways, and up and down our canyons, to crush into impalpability the blackened congelations there half sepultured? And, is the shrill whistle of the locomotive to stifle and drown that last agonized, hopeless scream of helpless innocence at the Mountain Meadows, that its frightful echos be heard no more forever? Never! sir, no never! with the consent of

ARGUS.            

Notes: (forthcoming)

HISTORY  OF  MORMONISM.
_______

(Written expressly for the Corinne Reporter and containing a
true and succinct account of the Reign of Terror in Utah. -- Ed.)

The Object of These Letters -- Cause of the Mormon Exodus from Illinois -- Brigham’s “Policy” -- The Meshes of Polygamy Pervert the Mind of the Prophet -- His Minute Preparations for the Diabolical Massacre -- The Precautions to Prevent an Escape from the Bloody Scene -- The Arch Fiend Covered with Evidence -- Etc.

Salt Lake City, August 10, 1871.    

                               An Open Letter to Brigham Young.

SIR: At the commencement of this correspondence, it was my purpose to write up, briefly, your history as Governor of Utah and Superintendent of Indian Affairs, to consider the more important acts of your administration in order as they occurred, with the hope that the whole might form a collection of ideas and plain matters of fact, which might be neither uninteresting nor unprofitable to the student of Mormon history. But I had proceeded only so far as the assembling of the first legislature of Utah, when the startling and unexpected information was received of your action in excommunicating Haight and Lee from the Church, on Mountain Meadow account. That you should have clung to and screened those villains all through the excitements concerning that massacre -- that you should have for fifteen long years continued to them the right hand of fellowship as worthy of membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day-Saints, and then, after so great a lapse of time, in an out-of-way settlement, almost totally off from any line of travel, suddenly and unannounced, cut them off from the Church, was so exceedingly strange that it seemed to me the better way to skip for the present over seven of the bloodiest years of your administration, and come directly to the consideration of the fiendish act for which you had apparently cut them off. Had I continued your history down through those seven years, there is much about the "massacre" now mysterious to the American mind, that would have been plain and easily understood. And, perhaps, it will not now be inapropos to state that there were two fundamental propositions adopted by you in the beginning of your career as the Mormon Chief, upon which the despotic and bloody fabric of your "policy" has been built; and they are, first, polygamy, and second, new kingdom and dynasty. It was in Nauvoo when you first conceived these ideas; and as polygamy could not long exist surrounded by Christian influences, you resolved on removing into the then unknown interior of the Continent, where the Mormon code of ethics might be of your own making. But, then, polygamy was not only to be established; it must also be protected. Again, it was not supposable that such protection would ever be acceded by a Christian nation; hence your determination to create a new and independent government specially designed to protect that institution, precisely and to the same extent that the South sought to establish a new government designed especially to protect slavery. This reasoning resulted in the "Great Mormon exodus" in '46, and the settlement of the Salt Lake country. And on the way, and after we arrived here, the favorite theme of yours, and the one ever present with the assemblies of the people, that it would be generations before polygamy would be disturbed in Utah, and by that time it could not be. Polygamy is the natural outgrowth of the Mormon system -- that is, the incorporation of the Patriarchal with the Christian dispensation; thus forming a new religion under the name of "The Ancient Order of Things;" and your bloody "policy" was the necessary result of polygamy. No sooner had we arrived here, than it was proclaimed that "Zion was free!" -- that you wanted nothing more to do with the United States, and that you didn’t intend to have. "You were the God appointed ruler of the people, and it was you alone that should rule them." Well, sir, that was a capital idea "to start in on," provided you could carry it out. You fixed your "policy" for success. It might have been fraught with moderation, justice, mercy and truth, and, indeed, all the virtues, had it not been for polygamy. That, sir, was the damning cause that perverted your reason, paralyzed the holiest efforts of truth, and turned your every purpose into blood. You began your rule, not with the scepter of righteousness, but with the sharpened steel. In your anomalous position of a feeble yet antagonistic Government within a stronger Government, you could not afford to have divisions among the people. There must be a positive unity. This you might have preserved by exhibiting in your acts, and those of your bishops a strong and an abiding sense of justice, ever tempered with mercy. But sir, you sought to accomplish that, first, by compromising every man in polygamy, and, second, by devoting every dissenter to "destruction in the flesh:" That is the language of your revelation, and means murder!

Now, sir, this "policy," as you loved to call it, formed an important part of almost every discourse pronounced from your many pulpits for years, even down to the time of Mountain Meadow Massacre, and for a long time thereafter. What must have been the moral effect of such teachings upon the people? I do not recollect in all my experience in Utah, of ever having heard from a Mormon pulpit and from a Mormon preacher a discourse addressed to the heart -- a discourse addressed to man’s higher moral nature, or one that was calculated to make him respect himself more, as a man, and a citizen. The preaching, even of Orson Pratt never reaches to the level of sound moral philosophy. The effect of such teachings has been unmistakably to brutalize the people. It was impossible for a whole community to sit Sabbath after Sabbath and hear sermons on polygamy, treason and murder; agriculture, cursing of "Uncle Sam," polygamy, and sending Gentiles to hell across lots; the setting out of shade trees, and other improvements, seasoned with platitudes on polygamy, treason, and the imperative duty of killing apostates, "obedience to counsel in all things, asking no question;" interlarded with polygamy, treason, and the shedding of blood; glowing descriptions of the "near prophetic time" when we should go through the American nation, waging a war of utter extermination, and fulfilling the bloodiest of the ancient prophecies; without absorbing more or less of the spirit of such damnable doctrines. This would be true in any community; but it applies with emphatic force to the people of Utah, whose more than ordinary credulity led them into Mormonism and to Salt Lake, and whose average low grade of education made it possible for them to be taught anything by you, who imposed upon them, in the first place, as a divinely inspired teacher. Sir, many a time have I sat in the congregation and marveled to see these simple people with eyes agape and tremulous with emotion, drinking from the fountain of your preaching just such intellectual poison as I have epitomized above. In your own language you were "teaching them to become gods;" but, in reality, you were transforming them into fiends. But, [sir], it was not all theory. There were frequent opportunities for a little practise: For as it was in the days of Elijah, the prophet, so it was in Utah. There were men who would not "bow the knee to the image of Baal." As the current of events would float such a man to the surface, and bring him to your fatal notice, immediately some calumny would be started against him, and then -- he would trouble you no more. Thus by precept and example were my brethren trained for years in the "school of blood!" and prepared for just such scenes as occurred at the Mountain Meadow, and by which Lee and his hellish crew could contemplate their intended action easily and calmly; as much so as they would a general turnout to construct a new irrigating ditch.

This remark does not apply to them only, but to the great body of the people from Salt Lake to Pinto Creek. For everything from the Jordan to the meadows showed calculation and design; and such design only as could be conceived by hearts trained in absolute abandonment and utter malignancy. From the facts that have been collected in these letters, it is evident that the plan for the destruction of that company was laid in Salt Lake City, before they had left their encampment at the Jordan. Understanding this, it is not difficult to comprehend that entire sameness of inhospitable action which the emigrants encountered in all the settlements they passed through. Not only was it concocted at Salt Lake, but it was laid with skill. Had the original order to assault the emigrants in Santa Clara Canon been carried out, not one of them would have been living in fifteen minutes after the head teams had been shot down. They would have been covered by the rifles of your troops from every possible direction. But ample provision was made to cut off any that might escape. For this purpose a party, headed by one Allan, was sent to watch the road between the train and the Muddy, and Ira Hatch and a fellow-missionary (!) were sent to the crossing of the Muddy. These good brethren were instructed to shoot down any who should chance to escape the attack of Lee. On the night of the second day of the battle, two men, on horseback, left the emigrants' camp, and started cautiously toward California. They had, probably, been sent. As they were passing Allen's ambush, one of them was shot -- the other got away. Word was dispatched to Parowan, and armed parties were immediately sent out to hunt down and kill him. They did not find him -- he had returned to camp, and was recognized after the massacre.

There was another little matter to be attended to: There were perhaps two thousand Mormons living at San Bernardino, and it would not do to permit the truth concerning the massacre to reach California, lest the people of that State, in their rage, might "wipe out" that settlement. So word was despatched to the authorities there, and a man named Boyle was sent on a mission to the Mojave Crossing well armed and with a key [[mail-sack key]], to prevent any suspicious mail-matter from reaching San Bernardino, and to pick off [[kill]] any one who by any possibility might have escaped and got along that far. There was, at that time, a monthly mail between Salt Lake City and that place. I mention this fact to show how thoroughly planned, and cold-blooded was everything connected with the war of extermination made upon the Arkansas emigrants; and to further show that extent of the operations prove that some other mind than John D. Lee’s had the direction and control of matters, and, in the very nature of the case, that mind must have been yours.

More anon,

ARGUS.              

Notes: (forthcoming)

HISTORY  OF  MORMONISM.
_______

(Written expressly for the Corinne Reporter and containing a
true and succinct account of the Reign of Terror in Utah. -- Ed.)

Brigham Young’s Indifference to the Mountain Meadow Massacre -- His Army of Defense -- Appeal to the Proper Authorities to Investigate the Massacre -- The Guilty Should be Exposed and Punished -- Etc.

Salt Lake City, Aug. 17, 1871.    

                               An Open Letter to Brigham Young.

SIR: That an entire company of peaceful families, as at the Mountain Meadows, should be butchered in cold blood, anywhere in the United States, upon the public highway, and within the easy reach of the arm of the civil power created expressly for the protection of life and property, is a mystery which the purely American mind finds very hard to understand. And the marvel is only increased by the fact that no inquest was held over the remains of those slaughtered ones -- that no arrests were made of the murderers, although they were well and notoriously known, and that no official notice was taken of the matter (except as I have heretofore stated) during the remainder of your term as Governor, and no apparent authoritative notice since, except to gather up, by soldiers of the United States, what bones the wolves had left, and giving them respectable sepulture. Based upon American ideas, and, indeed, upon the more general notions of civilization, the whole story becomes incomprehensible.

In order to understand this matter, it will be necessary for the reader, first, to mentally segregate Utah geographically from the United States -- to consider it as absolutely a foreign State and nation, with a civilization such as existed thirty-five hundred years ago, and a religion as antagonistic to Christianity as Moslemism itself, including within its creed a tenet more cruel and bloody than the Thuggism of India. Second, to consider this Deseret nation as incensed to the last degree against the Government and people of the United States, for a series of wrongs committed against them, including exile and the loss of life and property. Third, to take into the account, that the American Government at that time had actually proposed to extend its jurisdiction over said Deseret (otherwise called Utah), and an army was then on its way to occupy said Utah for the purpose of maintaining the sovereignty of said Government there, and that a state of war was apparently existing between said two nations. Fourth, that you were, at the very time of the massacre at the Mountain Meadows, mustering and putting into the field an army of one thousand two hundred men, which was known in Utah as "The Standing Army," and that said army was designed for active operations against the forces of the United States, under Colonel Johnston, then en route for Salt Lake. Fifth, that you were the "Sovereign" Lord of Deseret -- that your rule was an absolute and unmitigated despotism -- that your word was the only recognized law -- that it was within your imperious nature to rule with a high hand and a stretched-out arm over all your subjects, and with fury poured out against your enemies. If the reader can grasp the ideas contained in the above items, and arrange them into one compound proposition, he will be able to form some idea of the causes which made the aforesaid massacre possible.

But the misfortune is, that said proposition being based upon falsehood and not upon the truth, affords you no justification whatever; for, first, Utah was a part of the United States, and not a foreign State; second, your intense hatred of Americans and their Government was without adequate cause; third, the occupation of Utah as a Military Department was altogether a friendly act, and in strict accordance with the known military policy of the Government; fourth, that all your acts in relation to the State of Deseret were and are treasonable in their intent, and therefore illegal and of no binding force. For these reasons, the American people will refuse to look upon that massacre from your stand-point. They will and do hold you to your responsibility as a citizen of the Republic. And as you were at that time the Chief Magistrate of Utah, they have the right to demand why you took no official steps to inquire into that sanguinary affair which is the shame and damning disgrace of your administration. They have the right to demand why you took no official action in the case of Dame, Haight, and Lee; and how it is that you have so far persistently and successfully screened those murderers from the officers and the action of the law. It is a foul blot upon the workings of the system of American jurisprudence that the Mountain Meadow Massacre should having been committed nearly sixteen years ago, and to this present writing you, and Lee, and Dame, and Haight, are at large, and come and go unquestioned by the proper authority. The blush of shame should mantle the cheeks of the Governor of our Territory so long as that bloody affair remains uninvestigated, now that such investigation is possible. The judges of our courts should not have the courage to look a law-abiding man in the face so long as anything remains undone which they can legally do to bring those murderers to justice.

It appears to have all along been the opinion that the investigation of the Mountain Meadow Massacre must originate in the criminal courts. With that view, and the Grand Jury subject to your dictation, and under your complete control, what could be done? Nothing, absolutely nothing, but to wait. Murder is shielded by no statute of limitations. But I will here suggest, that such investigation should be made by a military court, for the reason that the operations of Lee were purely and undeniably of a military character. Such a court would officially determine the military character of those operations, would collect all necessary facts in the case, and those facts would fix the responsibility where it justly belongs. Then such ulterior proceedings could be had as the case would seem to demand. If there are not Gentile officers enough in the Utah militia to constitute such a court, enough can soon be commissioned. But no Mormon should be allowed to constitute a part of that court, nor any Gentile who could be allured from duty by your sirens or be purchased by your ill-gotten gold.

And now, in conclusion, as a Mormon, I demand of the proper authorities that this long-neglected affair be investigated, in order that the innocent may no longer suffer that reproach which belongs to Brigham Young and others only. In this connection it is proper to state that there is a strong and growing feeling in Southern Utah against Lee and his co-labourers on that bloody mission, and against their confederates, apologists, and protectors. Even in Cedar City those characters are now known as "Mountain Meadow Dogs." As a citizen of the United States, I demand that the veil of mystery so long covering that butchery be rent asunder, and the foul deed exposed in all its repulsive hideousness, bringing to the light those latent agencies which superinduced its commission, in order that justice may be meted out to the guilty parties, thus wiping out a foul blot upon the American name. In the name of Justice I demand it, that it may no longer be said that in Utah the direst of felonies may be committed with impunity. In the name of Truth, I demand that the facts concerning the Mountain Meadow Massacre be ascertained and stated in official form by competent authority, in order that the people of the United States may know that said massacre, even to its most sickening details, was only too true. And I think, sir, that I but reflect the common sentiment of the country when I say that you and Lee, and the whole holy company of apostles, prophets and elders of Mountain Meadow notoriety should be punished to the full extent of the law; or, failing in that, be outlawed and driven beyond the pale of human society, to wander, as Cain, vagabonds and accursed upon the face of the earth.

For the present, adieu.

ARGUS.              

Notes: (forthcoming)

HISTORY  OF  MORMONISM.
_______

(Written expressly for the Corinne Reporter and containing a true
and succinct account of the Reign of Terror in Utah. -- Ed.)

The Revelation of Polygamy Invented by Joseph Smith as a Cover for Incest -- His Brother’s Widow the
Chosen Victim -- She Burns the Document -- Brigham Young Returns from England --
Assumes the Presidency -- Counterfeits the Revelations -- Disbelief of the Mormons --
The Rogue and Liar of the Church -- Etc.

Salt Lake City, August 23, 1871.    

                                               An Open Letter to Brigham Young.

SIR: Joseph Smith, in introducing Mormonism, took Moses for his model; and the idea of the original gathering of Israel to the land of Canaan, was adopted by him as the basis of a new "Gathering Dispensation." When the Mormons began to "gather up" to the new Zion, they were instructed to obtain their genealogies as far back as possible. A new Book of Chronicles was opened; and the heads of these original Mormon families were to become the recognized Patriarchs of future families, tribes, and generations. It was this idea an expectation that at the outset gave to Mormon society a peculiar domestic turn, manifesting itself in a thousand unaccustomed yet innocent ways; discarding many of the severer rules of etiquette and introducing a degree of sociability among the people unknown in gentile circles. So marked was this, that Gentiles in the earliest years of the church, accused us of fornication and polygamy. This accusation was met by a solemn and truthful denial by a General Conference, the highest authority of the Church, which denial was made a part of the text of the "Book of Doctrine and Covenants," which contains the Mormon ecclesiastical constitution, and there it remains in irrepealable and eternal protest against polygamous marriage.

Nevertheless, Joseph had commenced in the manner stated; and to build up a religious system upon such a foundation, would naturally call into being more or less of Patriarchal ideas and institutions. An although it was a sad leaving of the Heavenly and pure Spirit of the New Testament, for the world, the flesh and the devil of the Old, there can be no doubt that he thought to harmonize and blend the excellencies of both into one new system of surpassing purity, holiness and grandeur. I am satisfied that Joseph, himself, was surprised at the developments which gradually but surely came to the surface of his system, as [necessary] and inevitable sequences. It would repay perusal to note here certain facts in proof of this, but brevity admonishes me to pass them by, and come directly to the facts upon which you found your doctrine of polygamy.

Don Carlos Smith, brother to Joseph, died in Nauvoo, in 1842, leaving no male issue. After the usual period of mourning had passed away, Joseph went to Agness, his brother’s widow, and stated to her that it was not right that Don Carlos' name should be lost in Israel; and that it was the duty of his next of kin to fulfill a certain office for him, in the hope that a son might be born which should bear his name. During this conversation he made no pretense to any new "revelation" upon the subject; but simply quoted Deut. xxv: 5, 6, in support of his position. This conversation Agness subsequently reported to my wife; and afterward to me. Like a true and proper minded woman, she told Joseph she preferred doing her own choosing in a matter which so nearly concerned herself; which she afterward did by marrying a Gentile, and leaving Nauvoo.

Joseph left Agness evidently with a large sized "flea in his ear;" but, as was his wont, went to his room and "inquired of the Lord" upon the subject, and, of course, received a revelation! This he showed to his wife, who took it, and after reading it, made a burnt offering of it then and there! Such is the history of the revelation, of which you claim yours to be a true copy. What that document was, you have no personal knowledge, as you were in England a the time. And this, Sir, is all you know, and all the Church knows about that revelation. If it commanded polygamy, or if it was intended for the particular benefit of Agness, it was a document worthy of the flames.

After Joseph was killed, you hurried back to Nauvoo, and succeeded in usurping the Presidency of the Church; and it is certain that polygamy was the main idea that controlled your action after that time. Then it was that if you didn’t hurt yourself in seeking after righteousness, you did beget children! And it was nothing else but the excitement on that question, that compelled the great Mormon exodus from Illinois. For, notwithstanding the secrecy enjoined upon the polygamists concerning the New Order of things, the idea got out; and, reaching Gentile ears in a perverted and mutilated form, they supposed that sexual license, unbridled and unchecked, was the rule at Nauvoo, that the civil law and the bonds of lawful wedlock had ceased their guardianship of honor, innocence and virtue; and that a condition of things existed in that city which could not and should not be tolerated. At the time of our leaving Nauvoo, there were many Mormons who did not certainly know that polygamy was to be an institution in the church, and a practice among the people. Because it was too dangerous a secret to communicate at once and to all. Therefore, it would be affirmed to A. and denied to B. The elders would argue for it in secret, and deny it before the congregation; so that the uninitiated knew not what to believe. They knew, however, that a prodigious heap of lies was piling up with fearful rapidity, that would at some time roll over and crush somebody. On the way to Salt Lake it was preached openly to the congregation; but the numerous missionaries abroad were ordered to continue the denial of its existence in the church, and denounce as liars the apostates who should contradict them. I will risk the assertion, that, if all the lies thus told by Mormons about polygamy were printed and loaded on a cart, you havnt a horse in your stable that could walk away with the load! It is this fearful amount of lying -- which your polygamy apparently necessitated during its secret period -- that ought alone to forever damn it as a moral or religious institution, or one that God could bless if he were to try.

This persistent denial of your darling [sic - daring?] sin continued until the 29th of August, 1852; when, at a missionary meeting at the Old Bowery at Salt Lake City, you caused a document to be read to the people, read, too, from a printed copy, which purported to be a true copy of the revelation that Emma Smith had burnt. At that time you had been President of the church nearly eight years. You claimed that Bishop Whitney had copied it from the original in Nauvoo, ten years before, and before Emma had destroyed it -- that it had been found among the Bishop’s papers after his death -- that you had since kept it under lock and key in your desk -- and, that the time had now come to make it public. As the Mormon public have never seen that precious manuscript, it is fair to presume that it still remains in its dark and secure resting place.

Now, Sir, let us see how this matter looks. You claim as much importance to polygamy as Christians do to the vicarious mission of Jesus Christ; that is, it is by polygamy that you are to be saved! Such are the terms of your revelation. It is what the Savior is to Christianity -- the corner stone of the temple of you faith.

Without it Mormonism is without an object, and is nothing. Did it ever occur to you that a future generation of Mormons would be apt to inquire into the genuineness of that document? You saw Joseph after your return from England; why did you not get a copy from him? Bishop Whitney was with you for years after you became President of the Church. You were in almost daily communication with him. He was our head Bishop. He, too, was a polygamist, and perhaps, fully of your faith in the importance of plural marriages as a Mormon institution. He must have known that you, as the chief expounder of that "doctrine," had not the scratch of a pen wherewith to prove your position; and that he had the only copy in existence; and yet he kept you in the dark notwithstanding the close intimacy and friendship that existed between you; and that precious (!) document was only discovered by accident among his papers after his death! It wont do, Brigham! It may for the present generation of Mormons, but it will not pass the more enlightened criticisms of their children.

But there is another version of this matter; and that is, that Bishop Whitney gave you that copy soon after you became the President of the Church. Your own statement at Salt Lake City, on the occasion of the public reading of the document, favors that idea. You said: "This revelation has been in my possession many years; and who has known it? None but those who should know it." In that case you had it while the Bishop was still living, and your almost daily companion. Yet you suffered years to go by, with this, your only witness, within call at any time! You wait till he dies, and then and not till then -- when he can neither testify nor stand a cross-examination -- do you make public this all-important document! Brigham, you are too clever a rogue for so stupid a thing as that. Yet, Sir, when you published that bogus revelation to the Church and to the world, as a copy of Josephs, your only witness was in the graveyard!

Joseph Smith made it a point that there should be nothing apocryphal about his writings; and should his revelations exist a thousand years, no doubt will probably obtain as to their genuineness as coming from him. But you, at the outset, have covered your "copy" with a veil of darkness, with a degree of doubt and uncertainty which it will be impossible to remove in all time to come. But the essential facts are plain and easily understood. They are, first: That your "copy" was manufactured to order. And, second: when Bishop Whitney died, you improved the opportunity and exhibited the same, in printed form; to the people; citing the dead man as your authority, to prove it a true copy of the supposed original. Whitney had been held by the Mormons as a man of sterling integrity. I submit, sir, whether it is not an insult to ordinary common sense, to seek to impose a document of so important a character, yet of so uncertain an origin, upon a whole religious body as the most essential to salvation, of all the articles of their faith? Yet, that is what you have done. It was an act, corresponding in its transparent dishonesty, with the average of the public acts of Brigham Young.

Yours,

ARGUS.              

Notes: (forthcoming)

MR.  GODBE  AND  POLYGAMY.

The Chicago Tribune is ventilating polygamy by the light which Mr. William S. Godbe is shedding upon it. This does not remind us of a little story, but it does recall a little fact, to this effect:

The first time we ever met Mr. Godbe was after he became a dissenter from the Latter Day Saints. We had a long conversation with him, and listened with much interest to his views. At that time he was as much a Mormon as George Q. Cannon, believed in and defended polygamy even as he is believed to practice it to this hour.

Several months afterwards Mr. Godbe called at the Herald office again, and again we listened to an exposition of his views. They had totally changed. When reminded of the fact, Mr. Godbe stammered a little and finally admitted that he was no longer a Mormon, but a Unitarian and a Spiritualist.

The same is true of Mr. T. B. H. Stenhouse. The ablest and most uncompromising advocate of Mormonism and Polygamy we ever listened to was Mr. Stenhouse. That confidence which no gentleman is at liberty to violate precludes our relating what that gentleman said upon this subject. When earnestly remonstrated with on certain points, we found him as firm as a rock, and, as we could not help thinking, the moat deluded man of his calibre whom we had ever met. And yet a few months only elapsed when Mr. Stenhouse declared himself no longer a Mormon. He is now in New York preparing a work that is intended to expose the mysteries of this wonderful sect, and, for us especially, it will have a curious interest -- Omaha Herald.

And the work of Stenhouse will be entitled to the same credit that might be given to a history of the rebellion in Heaven, if written by the devil.

---

PERSONAL. -- J. H. Beadle, formerly editor of the REPORTER, and now correspondent of the Cincinnati Commercial, arrived this morning from California, and will remain in our city during the week. In his journey he has visited the famed Yosemite and other sights of the Golden State, the which his graphic pen will delineate with new attractions for the people who dwell on the Ohio. Mr. Beadle comes much improved in health since his last visit to Corinne....

---

THE JOSEPHITES. -- A Semi-annual Conference of the Utah District of the re-organized church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, will be held in the Liberal Institute, Salt Lake City, on Wednesday and Thursday, the 30th and 31st of August. All are respectfully invited. By order of E. C. Brand, President of District.


Note: RLDS Apostle W. W. Blair was among those attending this small conference. Edmund C. Brand had been the chief RLDS missionary in Utah since July of 1869. According to an 1872 report given by John H. Beadle, the only two persons to whom John D. Lee ever gave a full account of the Mountain Meadows massacre, were himself and E. C. Brand.

JOTTINGS  ABOUT  TOWN.
_____

...O. J. Hollister returned from his trip south on yesterday's train....

The Central Pacific makes no charge on its road to-morrow, from this place to Ogden, for pedestrains...

This part of the world will soon be well advertised, for it is said that there are no less than twenty-seven different "Histories of Utah" now in press, all reliable as they are contradictory...

---

AMERICAN MINE. -- Thios ledge situated in our county on the range over Willard City, was discovered by George T. Miles, of this city, a few weeks ago, and since that time he has been energetically working for its development. The hill upon which the American is located, is now called Mount Zion, but not as an evidence of any faith held by Mr. Miles in the modern mission so named. The prospect at first indicated the existence of chloride of silver, which the later operations has confirmed; but the principal portion of the hill shows good galena-bearing quartz. A paying ledge is already opened on the American, but the owner, Messrs. Miles, Getrish and some others, do not intend to push operations until the Fall, when they are to employ double shifts of men, and make a winter's work tell on the mine. Their blacksmith shop, tools, etc., are all on the ground now, and good miners engaged for the work. Success to the "American" say we all.


Notes: (forthcoming)

BE  IMPARTIAL.
_______

The Salt Lake Review is doing heavy battle against one wing of the Mormon despotism. It goes strongly and with well whettled blades for Young and his cohorts, right before the citadel of their strength. So far, all right; but the Review should not confine its warfare to raids and forays of the prophet. [There are] just as bad as Brigham, who assume the role of "rats deserting the sinking ship," but if assured that the old craft of treason and polygamy could, with impunity, mount the billows of the law, would spring to their waiting places with fiendish joy. Brigham Young, we know to be a libertine, but it cannot be said that he ever denied that imputation. He keeps his concubines in Utah, which may be no special credit to our Grand Turk, for here it is unlawful; and that should be reason enough to end the nefarious business. But there be other Mormons who pretend to an apostacy from the faith, who cling to polygamy as a dogma of religious belief, and when their women are spoken of by proper titles, take high offense because concubinage is not classed with virtue. This class does not, like Young, tacitly plead guilty to the charge of libertinism, but with sensitive pertinacity tell the world to let them alone in their crime. Of these is Godbe, the aspirant of leadership in a usurpation of dominion over Israel, who goes beyond the confines of Utah to find dwelling for some of his strumpets in some of the Eastern States, and probably force them into contact in society with honorable women, in pure christian society. His contingent at home are no less exempt from the scorn of the press and legal punishment than the same class of females in the service of Young. When the master walks up to the scaffold, or is borne to the penitentiary, we shall expect to see in file with him, those of the New Movement who are not formally accepted as "states evidence" against their principals. For except they be so employed, it will be a most ingenious task, to prove them innocent, who, had for many years endorsed every act, good and bad, of Brigham Young. An attempt to shield a few, and cover others where the gravamen of the complaint is too fine for severance, will only show that we are unfair, prejudiced and unjust judges of our neighbors. The balance should be adjusted with nicety, and no partiality shown. If Brigham Young, Cannon and Wells, and the rest are libertines because they keep lewd women, then surely are Godbe, Kelsey and the other harlot-owners of the feigned schism as well, if not more, entitled to reprobation. These latter are of the eternal priesthood, and were participants in all the wrongs which their creed has put upon the people. They know the secrets better than Rockwell or Lee, and should be made to divulge or else go with their co-transgressors. It is only in this way that we would see Mormonism denuded, not by passively ignoring its most dangerous part while it hatched new venom and more deadly poisons. The Review is making vigorous thrusts, but unless it hurls blows with equal violence at all the law-breakers alike, the effort is useless. The devil of Brighamism is just as honest a demon as the devil of Godbeism in its hypocritical garments. Not the slightest difference between them, and if there should be, the original must be best.


Note: The Salt Lake Daily Review was the short-lived successor to Frank Kenyon's Corinne Daily Journal. The Review was published from Aug. 1, 1871 to Feb. 14, 1872 and featured contributions from O. J. Hollister and other noted Utah "Gentiles." Evidently Dennis J. Toohy, editor of the Reporter at that time, felt that Kenyon and his staff were not showing sufficient hostility towards the Utah Godbeites.

HISTORY  OF  MORMONISM.
_______

(Written expressly for the Corinne Reporter and containing a true
and succinct account of the Reign of Terror in Utah. -- Ed.)

The Revelation of Polygamy -- Brigham Young as the Agent of the Almighty -- Gentile Laws or Obligations
Not Binding on the Saints -- The Re-marrying Farce -- The Social, Moral and Abstinent
Endowments of the Mormons -- Evil Effects of Polygamy on the Youth -- Etc.

Salt Lake City, Sept 1, 1871.    

                                              An Open Letter to Brigham Young.

SIR: In the Salt Lake Tribune of June 14th the following language occurs: "It [meaning the Liberal Party in Utah] will support the Constitution of the United States instead of the unwritten laws of the so-called Kingdom of God, and will value the oath of a citizen beyond that of the Endowment House." This oath of the Endowment House, known there as the "new and everlasting covenant," an artfully composed item in your creed scarcely seeking to hide the treason, blood and polygamy which make up its substance, is what I propose to consider in this letter.

It was in Salt Lake City, on the 29th day of August, 1852, that you caused to be read for the first and last time to the congregation that most remarkable document, your "Revelation on Polygamy." You commenced by making the Almighty appear to say as follows: "Inasmuch as you have inquired of my hand to know and understand wherein I, the Lord, justified my servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; as also Moses, David and Solomon, my servants, as touching the principle and doctrine of their having many wives and concubines: Behold! and lo, * * * I reveal unto you a new and everlasting covenant. * * * All those who have this law revealed unto them must obey the same; * * * and as pertaining to the new and everlasting covenant, it was instituted for the fulness of my glory; and he that hath received a fulness thereof must, and shall, abide the law, or he shall be damned."

The above passages are quoted verbatim, but separated, for the sake of brevity, from less important matter. Such is the first section. The second reads thus:

"And verily I say unto you that the conditions of this law are these: All covenants, contracts, bonds, obligations, oaths, vows, performances, connections, associations or expectations that are not made and entered into, and sealed, by the Holy Spirit of promise, of him who is anointed, both as well for time and for all eternity, and that too most holy, by revelation and commandment, through the medium of mine anointed whom I have appointed on earth to hold this power, are of no efficacy, virtue or force in and after the resurrection from the dead; for all contracts that are not made unto this end, have an end when men are dead."

Such in the second section, interlarded with this parenthetic remark: "(And I have appointed unto my servant Joseph (Brigham) to hold this power in the last days, and there is never but one on the earth at a time on whom this power and the keys of this priesthood are conferred.")

Now, sir, let us strip this section of the verbiage which overs it so nicely, and discard the resurrection and eternity adjuncts, and we have the following proposition: All covenants, contracts, bonds, obligations, oaths, vows, etc., in matters pertaining to "THIS LIFE" not administered by Joseph Smith (BRIGHAM YOUNG) are without efficacy, virtue or force -- that is, they are null and void! Is not that, sir, a true interpretation of that section? Is it not the exact meaning which you and your apostles have given it time and again to the congregation? It is. In virtue of that proposition, has it not been taught to the Mormons of Utah until they have become fully indoctrinated with the idea that a "Gentile oath" is of no binding force? If that section is not intended to nullify all obligations, even to the marriage vow, the most sacred of all human covenants, why is it that a re-marriage of couples already legally married is a necessary ordinance among the endowment rites? I know these to be true; so does every Mormon in the territory. They are among the treasured "mysteries of the kingdom," that every experienced "Saint" knows to be inseparable from Utah Mormonism. Even old gray-headed couples, lawfully married to each other in their youth, who have brought up large families of children, embrace what you call Mormonism, and emigrate to Utah. Here they are taught that no marriage is of any virtue or binding force not solemnized by you. They become exercised over the idea of having lived in adultery so long a time, and bringing up a house full of bastards, so they pay up their tithing, hasten to the Endowment House, go through the serio-comic ceremonies there performed, and hasten to your altar in order to get married! You marry them, calling the lady by her maiden name! And that you do every time, thus ignoring the idea of efficacy, virtue, or force in any previous marriage. Not only do you repudiate the idea of sufficiency for all honorable and necessary purposes of the non-Mormon marriage covenant, but that repudiation extends in the language of your "revelation" to "all covenants," etc. It includes oaths taken before a magistrate, the oath of office, and the oaths of commerce. It includes and means everything as already enumerated by yourself in the "revelation."

Now, sir, did you ever carefully consider the social and moral bearing of that proposition? That "principle and doctrine" at once monstrous and abominable beyond degree? Did you ever consider how well calculated it is to crush out and destroy every moral sentiment, and break every link in the golden chain that holds society together? Let us suppose that the whole people of the United States should theoretically and practically adopt the second section of that "revelation." Where, in that case, would be the marriage vow? What virtuous girl would dare trust that vow which she knew her lover disregarded? Where would justice be; and who could confide in her ministrations? And where commerce and trade, and business of any kind that impose obligations? Who could plant with a reasonable expectation of reaping unmolested by some stronger man who regarded not an oath as binding on his conscience? Who would care to exact a promise of performances for valuable considerations? Who would dare hazard capital, knowing at the start that contracts, bonds and obligations were worthless in view of the fact that perjury and subornation had tacitly ceased to be crimes? What would become of the government, its property and its treasure, the official oaths and obligations of its officers being null and void? Where would be the civil service? aye, and the military? and, appropos of this, where would Brigham Young and his apostles have been in the spring of '58, when Johnson’s army located at Camp Floyd, less than six months after the massacre at the Mountain Meadows? And, to my certain knowledge, those brave and manly, yet enraged troops were only kept from wreaking summary vengeance upon you for that cowardly and inhuman slaughter, by those very restraints and safe-guards which you have so sacrilegiously declared to be "of no efficacy, virtue or force."

Sir, I suggest to you a re-examination of that second section. You declared it to be a "law." Yet you may search to the heights and depths of legal lore, civil and ecclesiastical, and fail to find its fellow. It is without precedent, and without a model. It is truly a monster of literature, and you, sir, are its sire. It is a proposition which, if universally received, would disintegrate society, and reduce mankind to their abnormal condition. It would supplant peace and good order by war and anarchy, and destroy all government, human and divine. Did you ever think of this? Doubtless. But you will answer by referring me to the good order and morality so general in Utah. I reply that this good order is entirely due to fear – and fear or incurring your god-like displeasure; and as for the morality, it is a long way more shadowy than substantial. For instance, the people of Utah have a wide-spread reputation for temperance. But who ever heard, or knew, of a Mormon refusing an invitation to drink whisky? I have yet to know of such a marvel. Then this temperance is not based upon principle, but is the result of surrounding circumstances, and especially from the general poverty of the masses. I will venture the assertion that if our mining interests in their realizations come up to within fifty per cent. of our expectations, thus filling our purses with money, it will be but a brief time before there will be more whisky drunk in Utah, per capita, than in any other State or Territory in the Union. Even now you have made more money out of the Mormons by selling them mean whisky than from any enterprise in the Territory in which you have actually invested your own capital. You will please not take me to mean that we are naturally more inclined to inebriety than others; but I do claim that your accursed revelation on polygamy has besotted its believers; and the only spirit they have remaining is that which they get from your whisky mill.

Then, as to certain relations between the sexes, you with high-sounding phrase point to the absence of bawdy houses in Utah as though all else except professional prostitution is to be reckoned in the list of sexual virtue. Now, sir, with due respect to my Mormon elders, I will bring to your mind certain facts well known to you, though kept as much as possible from people outside of the Territory. I refer to the constantly recurring irregularities between the Mormon young men and women. It is true that when a Mormon girl is found to be enceinte the authority of the church interferes at once, and compels the youth who has thus disgraced her to marry her forthwith. Thus the child begotten in bastardy is born in wedlock, and the sin of fornication white-washed. How common this is I have no desire to hurt feelings by being too particular, but feel compelled to say that it stands to-day second in the list of the immoralities of Utah, and is outranked only by polygamy itself. The question as to how such a state of things can exist under your peculiar system of espionage admits of but one answer. In the "Gentile world" where a maiden’s honor is in her own keeping, and where parents and guardians are the only special mentors, seductions are comparatively of rare occurrence. Here the morals of the youth of both sexes are carefully looked after, not only by parents and guardians, but also by bishops and teachers of the church in every ward throughout the Territory, who make it a special duty to keep watch over the youth, and yet naughtiness is one of the commonest of events. It is not to be understood that our young folks are naturally more inclined to do wrong than others; but their moral sense is benumbed -- they are led astray and debauched by the teachings they hear and the practices they see, based upon your damnable revelation on polygamy. But more of this at another time.

The main idea to which I wish to call your attention in this letter is, that the aforesaid second section of your "Revelation," is accepted by all good Mormons in Utah, precisely as I have paraphrazed it, and the only oath binding on their conscience, is that of the Endowment House. There have been occasions, when Mormons have been obliged to appear before a magistrate and take the hated Gentile oath; I tell you, sir, that, in every such case, that oath has been taken with a mental reservation; and the more sincere and honest in belief in the "Revelation," the more decided and positive that reservation. This does not imply that every Mormon on the witness stand necessarily perjures himself; but, I do claim that if his testimony is true, it is because he is naturally of a truthful disposition, or because the matter in controversy does not affect the Church, or because there would be danger in testifying otherwise; but the idea of the sacredness or binding force of that oath, is utterly repudiated. It is true, the law makes it binding; but the higher "law" of your "Revelation," absolves his conscience from its demands. For example, let us suppose that you were on trial for the crime of murder, as you should have been long ago, and a Mormon witness is called and sworn. He would reason to himself in this way: "In my oath in the Endowment House, which is the only oath binding on my conscience, I swore to sustain, defend, and, if need be, avenge the priesthood and the Church. That oath is an integral part of the new and everlasting covenant; That covenant has been revealed to me through President Young, and is a 'law' unto me. Having been so revealed, my salvation depends upon my abiding by its conditions; those 'conditions' expressly declare the oath I have just taken, to be 'of no efficacy, virtue or force.' My duty is plain; I must swear the President clear!" There is not a sincere Mormon in Utah that would do otherwise, and this would be true, not only in your case, but in every case, where the reputation or interests of Mormonism, were supposed to be jeopardized.

Assuring you, that I intend resuming this subject at an early day, I subscribe myself,

Yours, etc.,

ARGUS.            

---

JOTTINGS  ABOUT  TOWN.
_____

...Californians loitering here, have just time to get home and vote at their State election next Tuesday. Be off!...

In a few days the steamer City of Corinne will be ready to resume her regular voyages across Great Salt Lake.

---

SODA  SPRINGS.
_____

The New Mormon City -- Brigham Young
Buying the Gentiles Out.

Within the past few weeks Brigham Young has purchased nearly all the property of the settlers about the Springs, including the extensive ranch of Captain C. H. Roland, with its improvements, paying therefor the settler's own price. There can be no doubt of the intention of the Mormons to build up a new town at Soda Springs, in anticipation of the Utah Northern Railroad; and hence, their hurry to buy out all the Gentile squatters up there. We are delighted to learn that the Church is paying our friends high prices for their property, especially Captain Roland, who is about to remove to the States, to Chicago probably, where he intends to pursue a mercantile life hereafter. On yesterday Captain Roland sold all his horses, mules and cattle, to General Hoffman, of this city, who will place the fine stock in the pastures of this vicinity, as soon as they can be driven down. We wish the Captain all good luck, as he departs well "heeled" toward the civilized world, and wherever he drops anchor, there will the neighbors find a worthy citizen. Meantime, brother Brigham goes on building up his new city, where only the faithful are to be admitted within the pearly gates. That is if he can run his new road over the lands of the Central Pacific for sixty miles north of Ogden.


Notes: (forthcoming)

A  QUESTION.
_______

When the Utah Northern Railroad shall have been completed, we hear that all the freights and passengers to Montana, Northern Oregon, British America and Alaska, are to be switched off at Ogden, and taken on the narrow-gauge, via Soda Springs, to any gicen point on the globe, and no questions asked. California tourists are to go by that route, and by way of Helena and Puget's Sound, taking their baggage the same way. There will be no more use of the Central Pacific, and the towns along that line, being deprived of their business and resources, will have to retire, perhaps. Corinne is to be deserted by her patrons from the surrounding counties, the stage coaches must be withdrawn to ply from the new Eden on the upper Bear; fast and slow, the Diamond Ride to go back a hundred miles; and there is some talk of the lake overflowing this valley to an indefinite depth. That would be a small misfortune compared to some of the others, for our navy then might vie with Brigham's rails. If the land continues to remain above the wave we shall have nothing left, but the regrets of the past and our surplus cash. But, closing, let us ask the reader: Supposing the Soda Springs railroad finished to-day, or next year, what then? Try and answer this, some one.


Notes: (forthcoming)

A  TRUE  PICTURE.
_______

Reverend T. Dewitt Talmadge, a distibguished Christian minister of Brooklyn, New York, has been in Salt Lake City, and from there sent some graphic pen-pictures to the Independent. It is so seldom that tourists take the trouble of looking at any thing besides the rippling streams along the streets and the granite foundations of the Temple, that one is refreshed at reading from correct reports as in the case before us. For instance when the writer surveys the ground in this style:

Nothing impressed us more in Salt Lake City than the homeliness of the women. It may be ungallant to mention it; but, as every one that goes there thinks it, here goes the statement of the fact. Now, homeliness of feature is not always a disadvantage. There is a handsome ugliness, and a pious homeliness; but with these Mormon women it is a vicious and outrageous uncomeliness, indicative of moral disfigurement. The Tabernacle was alive with them. They made us shudder. It is "assault and battery" to have them look at you. What Brigham or any other man would want of seventeen such looking creatures I cannot imagine. One of them, I should think, would be a great horror. Such dislocation of noses, and misplacement of mouths, and ruin of eyebrows, are not gathered together in any other place on this planet. There must be a good many witches among them. We would not have been much surprised to see them riding home on a broomstick. The only excuse we can see for polygamy is that it would take at least fifty such women to make one wife.

We saw none of the halo around Salt Lake City that many writers have described. Admitting, as we do, the genius of Brigham Young for organization; and the fact that no place has seen such wonders of irrigation, which have turned a desert of wild sage into bloom, and that about eleven million dollars have been expended in aqueducts for bringing the snow-water from the mountain and pouring it through the gardens and along every street of the city; and that many thousand people of the Territory are completely under the supremacy of one man, so that if he winks they wink, and if he frowns they frown, yet there is a dark shadow of crime that hovers over all, and the day of doom is swiftly coming.

To so life-like a portrait, one of the Mormon newspapers indignantly objects, and says that if the Reverend gentleman "had remained longer, and had mingled more intimately with the women he affects to despise," his opinion would be different. Perhaps so; but it so happens that Mr. Talmadge is not supplied with the stomach of a dog.

Here is what we have on the depth of religious instinct; as deduced from conversation with a saint:

Question. -- "What apology have you to make for polygamy?"

Answer. -- "The Gentiles area corrupt generation, and that race will die out. Our object is to fill the land with a rapidly increasing generation of Mormons, who will be a superior race, physically as well as spiritually. I would have no hope for the triumph of our church except through polygamy."

Turning to his boy, that stood by him, he put his hand under the youngster's chin, and said to us: "Look there! See what an eye that boy has, and what a face! You see no such beauty as that outside of Mormonism!" The fact was that the child looked like a half-breed Indian, and gave no promise of ever being bright enough to learn his letters. We saw two boys of about the same size and promise at the Holy Communion, of which they had just partaken in the Mormon Tabernacle, making spit-balls of the consecrated bread and throwing them at each other.

The able correspondent draws a comparison which, however, gives the odds to the ancients. He says:

The analogy between Salt Lake City and Sodom is perfect. Both situate on a plain, surrounded by mountains, wild, grand, volcanic. Both near a lake so bitter that no living thing can dwell there. The crime of one was the crime of the other. The doom of the ancient city in the smoke of the Sulphur Springs seems to hover over the modern. And, if we had not been too weary to accept the invitation to preach, we would have taken for our text the words of the angel to Lot: "Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain: escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed!"

Let us have a few more such visitors who can strike at the roots, and let irrigation and the grasshoppers take care of themselves.

---

PERSONAL. -- General P. E. Connor arrived in town last evening from Salt Lake City, and we are happy to meet that distinguished gentleman among the host of friends in Corinne. The General is at present engaged in the construction of water works, at Pioche City, Nevada, having the enterprise nearly completed....

---

TO THE LAKE. -- A large party of ladies and gentlemen went down to the lake shore in their carriages this afternoon to enjoy the sea breeze, which is there as fresh as that snuffed up by the aristocracy of Long Branch. Some of those in the excursion to-day were Col. Jihns, Hon. John A. Stein, of Indiana, J. M. Johnson, of Chicago, Genernal Hoffman, Ed. Conway, Nat. Stein and their ladies, besides many whom we failed to recognize, as they passed the REPORTER office at a 2.40 gait.


Notes: (forthcoming)

HISTORY  OF  MORMONISM.
_______

(Written expressly for the Corinne Reporter and containing a true
and succinct account of the Reign of Terror in Utah. -- Ed.)
_______

Revelations Refuted -- Blood Atonement, How Established -- Divinity Hedges the Prophet --
The Murder of Apostates -- Complete Exposition -- Prophecy and Petticoats.

Salt Lake City, Sept. 7, 1871.    

An Open Letter to Brigham Young.

SIR: In the first section of your "revelation" commanding polygamy, it is declared that said revelation is a "law" unto the people. In the second it is declared that "the conditions of this law are these: All covenants, contracts, bonds, oaths," etc., except the oath of the Endowment house, are null and void. The third section is nearly all verbiage; but contains this proposition: "No man shall come unto the Father but by me, or by my word, which is my law." (Which means this revelation on polygamy.) The fourth states substantially that no Gentile can have his wife in the next world! In the fifth we have the doctrine, that though a man can marry a woman for time and eternity, if that marriage is not solemnized by you, it is null and void. The sixth section contains the "key" to your ideas of the resurrection, immortality and salvation in these words: "Which glory shall be a fullness and a continuation of the seeds forever and ever." This section is emphatic in the announcement that those parties married by you, at your polygamous altar, "shall inherit thrones, kingdoms, principalities," etc. * * * Then shall it be written in the Lamb's Book of Life, that "ye shall commit no murder whereby to shed innocent blood." But in the tenth section, you show that the "innocent blood" spoken of, means your blood; (not such unanointed and unsanctified blood as that shed at the Mountain Meadows.) The seventh section is worthy of note. You say, (referring to those who go into polygamy under your administration, "Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue." (That is, their posterity or "seeds" continue.) The eighth is nearly all surplus-age; but shows your pet idea that immortality consists in a "continuation of the lives;" that is, you expect to live forever in your offspring. The ninth I shall quote entire, because it is in this section that you affirm the necessity of murdering Apostates in order to save them.

"Verily, verily I say unto you, if a man marry a wife according to my word," (that is, in polygamy and by virtue of the requirements of this revelation,) "and they are sealed by the Holy spirit of promise, according to mine appointment, (that is, at your altar,) "and he or she shall commit any sin or transgression of the new and everlasting covenant whatever, and all manner of blasphemies, and if they commit no murder wherein they shed innocent blood," (the blood of the Mormon priesthood) "yet they shall come forth in the first resurrection, and enter into their exaltation; BUT THEY SHALL BE DESTROYED IN THE FLESH, and shall be delivered unto the buffetings of Satan unto the day of redemption, saith the Lord."

In the tenth section you make the "blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which shall not be forgiven in the world nor out of the world," to be the killing of Brigham Young, or assenting to his death! By the eleventh section, this "revelation" is made the "law of the Holy Priesthood." Of the remainder of the revelation, the only section worthy of notice is the twenty-fourth, which reads as follows:

"And again, as pertaining to the law of the Priesthood, -- if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent; and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified; he cannot commit adultery, for they are given" (who gave them?) "unto him, for he cannot commit adultery with that that belongeth unto him and to no one else; and if he have ten virgins given unto him by this law, he cannot commit adultery; for they belong to him; and they are given unto him; -- therefore is he justified. But if one, or either of the ten virgins, after she is espoused, shall be with another man, she has committed adultery, and shall be destroyed; for they are given unto him to multiply and replenish the earth, according to my commandment, and to fulfil the promise which was given by my Father before the foundation of the world; and for their exaltation in the eternal worlds, that they may bear the souls of men; for herein is the work of my Father continued, that He may be glorified."

I have now gone through your blasphemous "revelation," and gathered therefrom all that is worthy of notice as being distinctly Mormon. This effort of inspiration ptoposes, first, a Higher Law -- a law superior in its claims to the Law of the Land. Second, a law which at once and totally destroys the sacredness of Gentile covenants, the binding force of contracts, and the virtue of oaths and obligations. Third, a law which makes polygamy the great essential means by which mortals can attain to salvation and exaltation in the celestial kingdom of the Almighty. Fourth, a doctrine which teaches the defication of Mormons. Fifth, a law which delares a murder committed against the Mormon Priesthood, to be blasphemy against the Holy Ghost! Sixth, a command to murder apostates, in order to save them! Seventh, explaining the moral character of polygamy, which is, by the way, a very different kind of marriage system from that which you are practicing. Because that makes it a positive condition, that the espoused shall be virgins who have vowed to no other man; while the chief characteristic of your polygamy has hitherto been to corrupt, and steal away other mens' wives. You will nelieve me when I tell you, that I once heard one of the brightest of your apostles state, in a public discourse, that polygamy was the "sum of Mormonism;" -- "that the principles of the Gospel were but a net cast into the great sea of mankind to gather the people together, in order that they might be saved by means of polygamy." I heard that, sir, and it is but one among unnumbered affirmations of like character that have been uttered.

And this is your religion! It is the corner stone of the great temple of your kingdom of God! It is to you what slavery was to the South; aye, and more; for while that was but a question of economy and policy, this penetrates the charmed circle of the fireside, reposes volumptuously between your sheets, is deified as something worthy of adoration; -- as a goddess it rules supreme, giving shape, color and direction to all the experience of life, all of faith in God, and all of hope in Heaven. In so far as the reasoning in revelation is concerned, it is utterly sophistical and false. You begin by assuming that the ancinet Israelites acknowledged polygamy as a religious "principle and doctrine;" which is not true; because the word, principle, implies a fundamental truth, and, doctrine, consists in propositions based upon that truth; and in this sense it can not be proven from the scripture. God gave to David wives and concubines in the same sense that He did wheat fields and vineyards, the sunshine and the rain; and in no other. He and Solomon were polygamists because they wanted to be, and don't pretend to give us any other reason. They went into plurality for precisely the same reasons that the Indians do to-day. And, what is not to be forgotten, they did so in direct contravention of the command of Moses, which enjoined the kings of Israel from multiplying wives: Deut. xvii, 17. Polygamy occurs in the Bible in the same sense, and upon the same terms that the incest of Lot does -- that is, they were simply and equally matters of fact. It is nowhere mentioned, except as a matter of history, and nowhere as a "principle and doctrine." With regard to oaths and covenants, the Bible holds them as absolutely sacred, and to be performed. Nothing would have shocked the moral sense of Moses, more than the "doctrine" contained in the second paragraph of your revelation. Then, again, the most important of all the sayings of Moses, is found in Deut. vi. 4 -- Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one Lord; and in chapt. iv:35, there is none else besides Him. That is the great idea of the Old Testament; and the one which more than all else distinguished the religion of Moses from the Polytheism of the world. But your revelation makes gods of the Mormons! Thus reviving, in the nineteenth century, the theogony of the ancient Pagans. Then as to your wonderful effort on the question of adultery, why, sir, if a man can not commit adultery with ten women, simply because he claims that they belong to him, how can he commit incest with his ten daughters for the same reason? And before the Emancipation Proclamation, how could a Southern planter commit adultery with his wenches? They belonged to him. Such is the wretched sophistry of your revelation.

And this is your religion! This is that divine system by which you propose to save the human family! You begin with the admoration of pretty ankles, progress by the prostitution of the niblest of the moral sentiments -- the obligations of contracts, and end with the cutting of throats -- for Christ's sake! I well remember, sir, when such vile stuff formed no part of the Mormon system; and so do you. You commenced in the spirit, and you have ended in the flesh. Heavens! what a progression! Insired prophet! Who shall sufficiently sing thy praises in the great congregation, or sound the trumpet of thy fame to a listening world? O, modern Solomon! why may reach the volumes of thy incomparable wisdom, or penetrate the depths of the multitude of thy loves? Divine teacher! How well hast thou made thy people in all things, whilst thou art content with honest poverty! How thou hast enrobed them by rich lessons in philosophic truths, thus bringing into active training the higher and better qualities of their nature! How pure and spotless thy life, how honorable thy every action, how unfailing thy every promise! Surely the saints shall laud thee, saying: "Thy word is as good as thy law!" With what impressiveness hast thou taught us to deal justly, love mercy, and walk humbly before God! With what glowing eloquence and sympathetic tenderness, hast thou preached to the saints of the love of the Divine Redeemer, His humility, long-suffering and patience! How well and truly thou hast taught, both by precept and example, these great commandments: "Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife!" Immaculate Apostle! Thou hast progressed in the divine life, as no servant of God ever did progress. By the power of thy faith, thou hast climbed the sacred pillars of hope and love, even to the Heaven of Heavens; and entered there, rending asunder the veil that hides the infinite from the view of mortals; and there prostratedst thou thyself in the presence of thy Creator! Thou hast seen thy God! To gaze enraptured on that Heavenly being, thou wert placed, not as Moses, in the cleft of the rock, while the Lord passed by; but beneath a huge, promiscuous pile of -- -- -- homemade petticoats.
              Yours, undoubtedly,   ARGUS.


Notes: (forthcoming)

HISTORY  OF  MORMONISM.
_______

(Written expressly for the Corinne Reporter and containing a true
and succinct account of the Reign of Terror in Utah. -- Ed.)

The Crime of Murder Defined for Brigham -- The "Cutting Off" of Haight and Lee from the Church -- Why it was Done -- Brigham Fears the Arch-Fiends of the Mountain Meadows Massacre -- The Prophet as the Very Embodiment of Hypocrisy -- The Head of the Mormon Church Openly Charged with Murder -- The Modern "Macbeth" -- Etc.

Salt Lake City, Sept. 14, 1871.    

                                                          An Open Letter to Brigham Young.

SIR: There are times defined, limited and regulated by law, when the taking of human life is and may be justifiable. First, in the defence of life; second, when life is taken accidentally and without any intention of killing; third, when taken by soldiers within the military regulations; fourth, when taken in fulfillment of the sentences of the law. Any other life taking is murder; provided there be a union or joint operation of act and intention, or criminal negligence. Then, if a Gentile in the streets of this city should with criminal intent kill another Gentile, or a Mormon, it would be murder. Now, let us reverse the case, and suppose that a Mormon should kill another Mormon, or a Gentile, would it not be murder? The circumstances being the same, would there be any difference in the criminality of the two acts? Is it the man who kills, or the intent to and act of killing, that constitutes the crime? Would not the unlawful taking of human life be equally criminal whether taken by desperado in our streets or the highest civil officer in the Territory? And would not all just men consider it so absolutely? Why should the guilty in one case be condemned and not in the other? Certainly, intelligence, refinement and exalted position are considerations which bit tend to aggravate and intensify the criminality of that which is by the law made criminal. You can not be ignorant of the fact that in the United States no priest, as such, can sit in judgment upon a case of life and death. The power that legally take life must be, first, responsible; second, it must have been constituted and regulated by law, having bounds set beyond which it can not pass to the prejudice of the rights of the accused. These questions and propositions are introduced here because they are entirely apropos of the history of Utah, and are put for your grave and earnest consideration, not by myself as a Mormon, or an apostate, but as a man. It is immaterial who he is that puts these questions, and whether he sails in your boat, or paddles his own canoe. It is enough to know that they originate in that instinctive abhorrence which man has to the unlawful and irresponsible shedding of human blood, and a painful sense of the bounden duty of every good citizen at whatever time and in whatever place to aid in bringing the murderer to justice. This may be equally true of other criminals; but it is possible for such to offer reparation for wrong without the forfeiture of life. It is for this reason that the punishment for offences, other than capital, comes within the statute of limitations. But life can be the only equivalent for life; and therefore the duty of prosecuting the murderer ceases only with his life. This is not only in accordance with all known criminal law, but with our own Book of Covenants, which says: "He that kills shall be delivered up unto the law of the land;" and, again, "He that kills shall mot have forgiveness in this world." In this connection we are not only to consider the principal villain, but the accessory also. This latter is one who, being present, hath advised, encouraged and counselled the perpetration of the crime. The guilt of the accessory is equal with that of the principal. An accessory after the fact is one who after full knowledge that a crime has been committed conceals it from the magistrate, or harbors and protects the person charged with or found guilty of the crime.

My mind has been drawn to this particular line of thought by information lately received of your proceedings at St. George, when you excommunicated Isaac C. Haight and John D. Lee from the church. It appears that Lee, who was not present, knew nothing of your action in his case until after the meeting. In fact the first he knew of it was from your own lips. Haight was there; but was completely surprised at the steps taken to cut him off. He claims that he was not notified to appear. He had tried to speak in his defence, but you silenced him at once, and refused him any opportunity to defend himself. There was no formal charge presented against these men; there was no regular trial. They were simply accused of murders committed at the Mountain Meadows nearly thirteen years before, and voted out of the church without a hearing. Now, sir, I refer you to our Book of Doctrine and Covenants, which says that "any member of the church transgressing, or being overtaken in a fault, shall be dealt with as the Scriptures direct." And again: "In all cases the accuser and the accused shall have the privilege of speaking for themselves before the council, after the evidences are heard and the counselors who are appointed to speak on the case have finished their remarks." Then, after the decision has been given, "of the remaining counselors who have not spoken, or any one of them, discover an error in the decision of the President, they can manifest it, and the case shall have a rehearing; and if, after a careful rehearing, any additional light is thrown on the case, the decision shall be altered accordingly." You see, sir, that by the canons of our church every man is entitled to a fair trial. And you will bear in mind that any decision really or pretendedly predicated upon those canons is recognizable by the civil courts. To Illistrate I will say, that if previous to the excommunication of Haight and Lee you did not deal with them as the (New Testament) Scriptures directed, and if you did not cite them to appear before you substantially as required by the ecclesiastical code, and if you did not formally charge them, giving them a reasonable time to answer, and if at the trial you did not permit them to introduce testimony or speak for themselves, or if you abridged them in any of their legal rights as defendants, you are liable for damages in an action at law before our civil courts, regardless of the guilt or innocence of the defendants. My informant, a good Mormon, who little thought she was talking to "Argus," told me that when Haight assayed to speak in his defense you immediately arose, and in an excited manner commanded him to keep silence, and commenced to walk back and forth, saying you wouldn't "hear a murderer speak." Oh? you wouldn't? Y-o-u wouldn't!! Immaculate prophet! Surely innocence shall die with you! After having fellowshipped those men for thirteen years since the Mountain Meadows massacre -- after having protected them from arrest and punishment by the courts during all that time -- after having deceived the American people and surprised your own by the most unjustifiable lyings through the columns of your official organs, in which you substantially denied that any Mormon had anything to do with that massacre -- after having sacrificed even your personal honor to Governor Cumming in 1862 by promising to have those very men arrested and tried -- you suddenly become so exceedingly good that you won't even hear them in their own defense! Out upon such hypocritical masquerading! Why, sir, a judge of our courts would hear the vilest and meanest of criminals. He would hear you in your defense. I will tell you why you would not let Haight defend himself. It was because he was a member of a military council that received and acted upon the instructions sent by you to govern Colonel Dame in his action toward those ill-fated emigrants. Isaac C. Haight knows perfectly who is and ought to be held responsible for that massacre. He could have told you to your face and in the presence of the people that in that inhuman slaughter neither Lee nor himself transcended the orders received from their superiors "both in the church and in the military!" He could have given a testimony which would have made you shake worse than you did when Judge Titus said to you in this city: "Sir, you are a murderer, and I have got the proof in my pocket!" There were indeed conclusive reasons why you durst not let Haight enter upon his defense, and why you dared not hold your very un-ecclesiastical court in the presence of Lee. And this was you who had become so shocked at "man's inhumanity to man" that you "wouldn't hear a murderer speak." Poor Macbeth, how that dagger must have frightened you!

Sir, your proceedings on that occasion were not only un-American, unjust and tyrannical in the last degree, but they reveal and publish the guilty conscience of Brigham Young as clearly as though your confession of guilt should appear in the next issue of the Deseret News. And as a fitting conclusion to those contemptible doings, upon your return to Salt Lake City, you stopped at Harmony and told Lee what you had done, saying "the whole proceeding was but a sham and pretense, for purposes of policy!" and advised him to remove to Kanab, and take his wives and all his family with him. Sir, it requires an effort to keep one's temper when coming so frequently and repeatedly in contact with your double distilled duplicity and treachery! After sacrificing Lee at St. George by withdrawing from him your still powerful protection, you cajole him into acquiescence by a falsehood. You artfully extract the fangs with which the serpent could effectually strike you by deceiving him with a few sift words and show of patronage which cost you nothing, while they serve to close his mouth and prevent the possibilities of vengeance. The cutting off of Lee and Haight was no sham. It was an earnest, serious action on your part, not because you was horrified at their crime, but, rather, alarmed for yourself. Yes, sir, you have succeeded in getting Lee off to Kanab, where he can be under the espionage of your Danites, away from Gentile interference, and where he can safely be assassinated whenever it shall be deemed necessary to your safety.

In conclusion, let me say to you in solemn earnestness that you are bound by every consideration of the circumstance, by the important facts involved, by the value you place upon your imperiled reputation and that of the church over which you preside, by the regard you have for a popular verdict which, if finally against you, may be found to be incontestable and crushing in its uncontrollable indignation, to nullify those extra-judicial proceedings had in the obscure settlements of St. George, and duly cite Wm. H. Dame, I. C. Haight, and John D. Lee to appear before a General Conference of the whole Church at Salt Lake City, giving them timely notice of the time, and the exact charge upon which they will be tried, with the privilege of employing counsel without regard to church membership, and then with open doors, free to all comers, give them a full and fair trial. And finally, be you there as their accuser, and face them like a man. You dare not do it.     ARGUS.


Notes: (forthcoming)

HISTORY  OF  MORMONISM.
_______

(Written expressly for the Corinne Reporter and containing a true
and succinct account of the Reign of Terror in Utah. -- Ed.)

Salt Lake City, Sept. 21, 1871.    

                                                       An Open Letter to Brigham Young.

SIR: If you have ever asserted by a direct negation that you were not in some way connected with and responsible for the massacre at the Mountain Meadows, I am not aware of it. That you have in an indirect, non-committal, Mormon sort of fashion seemed to deny such responsibility is undoubted. It is true, however, you have said but very little about it. It was a bad egg to break, and the farther it was kept out of reach of expression the better. Besides, you have certainly rested your hopes of escaping the perils and possible consequences of a criminal charge in the matter by the ill-advised and unasked-for pardon of President Buchanan, and therefore hoped the whole subject, if it could be kept quiet, would die a natural death. But I think, sir, your attorneys will find that while said pardon included your operations in Echo Canyon, and the Plains and elsewhere where you were operating against the military forces of the United States it did not include a warfare against non-belligerents as in Lee's expedition. It did not include the extermination of peaceable families traveling upon the public highway, The massacring of those families was not an act of rebellion for which you were pardoned, but a commission of murder for which the principals and accessories are to-day liable to be hung. There is one plea which you have made ostensibly to establish your innocence, but really in extenuation of your crime. I refer to the story of your sending a special messenger to Colonel Dame forbidding the massacre. There are some items connected with this matter to which I wish to call your attention. To begin with, you never sent a special messenger at all after your troops had left Cedar, but you probably did send a reply by the courier sent by Colonel Dame asking you some question connected with the expedition against the emigrants. What that reply was is not certainly known, but was supposed to be in the emigrants' favor. I wish to ask you why it was that Dame should take the trouble and go to the expense of expressing through you any message whatever concerning a company of emigrants quietly pursuing their way and especially a message which evidently affected and was intended to effect their lives and property? What would be thought to-day if a courier from Colonel Dame should reach the office of Governor Woods with a similar message? That's the question! Then again, at what time did Dame dispatch that courier? Was it at the time the emigrants left Cedar? or at the beginning of the fight? If the former, then he had nine days before the massacre in which to receive an answer and dispatch it to Major Lee. If the latter, then he had five days. Now the time necessary to start a message from Parowan to Salt Lake City and receive a reply to the same would require not to exceed sixty-five hours, and from Parowan to the Meadows four hours. Then, supposing that Lee immediately started a courier to Dame at the commencement of the fight, I will add four hours more, which would have given twenty-three surplus hours in which a message from you would have saved the loves and property of the Arkansans had it pleased your Excellency to send such an order of mercy. But, then, what reason have we to suppose that Colonel Dame waited until the fight had begun before he sent his courier? On the evening preceding the morning the troops left Cedar there was a meeting of the troops in that town, at which Dame was present and instructed the militia in general terms as to the object of the campaign, and as to what they were expected to accomplish. After the troops had started, Dame returned to Parowan, and doubtless sent you word of the fact. If this be so, then he had nine instead of five days in which to save that company. And it is not to be forgotten that when the troops left Cedar, Dame knew the fate in store for the emigrants as well as he did at any time thereafter.

Now, sir, one of two things is certain; either the idea of exterminating that company originated at Parowan and Cedar, or at Salt Lake City, and if the latter place, then in your office. But if Lee had started that idea it would not have met with the sanction of Colonel Dame, who is one of the most timid of men, and is known and acknowledged as the greatest coward in Southern Utah. And one of the clearest evidences that Lee's expedition was the result of your direct and specific order consists in the fact that the militia was called out and started on by Dame. But if we draw so far upon our imagination as to suppose that the proposition of the expedition was Dame's, still it would not have met with the approval of General George A. [Smith], independently of you, and, of course, it would have been dropped then and there. And, besides, that precious trio were too good Mormons, and too well posted to dare originate anything, more especially so important a campaign as the one in contemplation. For a little regimental officer to originate a public measure or act would have been presumption unknown in the annals of Utah. They knew that your rule included everything civil and military within its active, vigilant, vigorous notice, and with a string and unsparing arm controlled public and private action throughout the Territory. Dame, Haight and Lee would no more have dared to order out the militia, and carry out to completion the campaign that accomplished the Mountain Meadow massacre, than they would dare sever their limbs from their bodies. Then why were the militia called out at all? There is an ugly fact that comes in here -- I mean the mission of your aid-de-camp, General George A. He had traveled ahead of that company, commanding the people to sell them nothing and to buy nothing from them, and was in Dame's office when the courier from Lee reached Parowan. But what is strange and somewhat tinges this "courier" story with romance is that your express and Lee's should enter Dame's office precisely at the same moment! Yours forbidding the massacre, and Lee's reporting to his Colonel that the job was done! Upon the whole, it is fair to doubt that you sent any such message, and if you did it was one of your artful dodges to shun responsibility, knowing, as you must have known, that the chances were a thousand to one that your message would arrive too late to save the emigrants. Here the inquiries come in: How was it that you sent your message of mercy to Dame and not to Lee? and why should it have been Dame who sent the courier to you if he was not as the Colonel of the regiment operating against the emigrants? The true answers to these questions would give to the while movement its proper military look. Now comes the pith of the whole matter: It was clearly understood, and was doubtless the fact, that you had put the Territory under martial law. Keeping this fact in view, the following queries include the whole matter: First, in the calling out of that regiment, did Col. Dame act upon his own responsibility? Second, did he act in pursuance of your order? Third, did he act upon his order based upon some general order of yours which would require such proceedings in such a case? Fourth, if he had that bloody job done without specific order from you, would you not have called him and Lee to an account fir it? Of course you would.

You perhaps think that Argus is pressing matters pretty closely. And I am satisfied that a possible future, terrible and retributive in its character, forces itself, not unfrequently, upon your guilty imagination. My letters are but thoughts, long pent up, but now finding expression; and that expression finds its justification in a clear and undoubted sense of duty. I have neither ambition nor desire to prosecute or aid in the prosecution of anybody. Notwithstanding I am so well satisfied -- so thoroughly convinced of your complicity in the massacre at the Mountain Meadows, and in all the blood-atonement murders that have been committed in Utah, that were I your judge I should undoubtedly hang you, and then States-prison every anointed perjurer who had tried to swear you clear. And severe as this language is, I am sure it will find responsible echoes in more than one Mormon breast. In order to consider the history of "your administration" in its true light, and to hold your acts at their just value, the Mormon mind must disrobe you of the regal purple in which you seem to be arrayed, and displace from your brow that imagined dazzling tiara of divine authority. For so long as the mind shall receive you as the monarch to rule and the inspired seer to teach, your voice will be the voice of God, your affirmation the inspiration of Heaven, and your every counsel and command a law which may not be disregarded. It was your ambition so to teach and impress your people; and their unhappiness to receive such instruction as the manna which comes from Heaven. It was this false and wicked estimate in which you have been held, that has compelled the acceptance as pure and true of dogmas which make no appeal to the scruples of a well-trained conscience, which have no voice for the heart -- no sympathies for the soul. It was the Mormon faith in the reality of the prophetic office, and in the inspiration of ots acknowledged incumbent, which enabled you to fasten "blood-atonement" upon the church as an institution, and to sanctify in their estimation as the perfection of holiness, pleas and practices which the moral and religious sense of Christendom has pronounced to be earthy, sensual and devilish. It is astonishing that in the United States a whole religious denomination can be found to accept as divine truths your favorite dogmas. That the right hand of the Almighty is red with human blood; and the road which leads the worshipper into the presence of God and the holy angels, should have petticoats for guide-flags! We will get bravely over this by and by, when the sober after thought shall come to dispel the illusion of your imaginary royalty and semi-divinity. Then the deceptive show, the false reasoning, the Utopian dream will disappear, and you will be to us simply as a citizen of the United States. Then will we be able to measure your words by the same rule, and weigh your actions in the same balance that we do other men's! Then, sir, will the dark and blood thirsty history of Utah appear to Mormons as it should appear, and her chief Priest, who has offered up so many human sacrifices upon the altar of his treasonable ambition and unholy lust, the foul murderer that he really is.     ARGUS.


Notes: (forthcoming)

HISTORY  OF  MORMONISM.
_______

(Written expressly for the Corinne Reporter and containing a true
and succinct account of the Reign of Terror in Utah. -- Ed.)

The Prophet's Sacred Person Guarded Night and Day -- His Abject Fear of Assassination. -- The Coward's Dread of His Own Shadow -- The Cost of His Protection -- Who Pays fot It -- The Cause of His Fear -- The Revelator's Guilty Conscience -- The Blood of a Hundred Murdered Innocents Before His Eyes. -- Etc.

Salt Lake City, Sept. 28, 1871.    

                                                      An Open Letter to Brigham Young.

SIR: The President of the United States travels without a bodyguard, and sleeps without armed sentinels at his door. This is also true of the Governors of States and of American citizens generally. There is not a bishop of any religious body in our country that goes thus guarded. There has not been a Governor of Utah, except yourself, that has about him, day and night, armed men regularly employed and paid expressly for his personal protection. It is not only a peculiarity, but one of the crowning glories of our republican government that magistrates and rulers can go and come and freely mix with the populace anywhere and at any time unattended, and without fear or danger of assassination. President Lincoln was only a partial exception to this rule; for he was not attended in such a manner when he was killed. But, sir, from the beginning of your rule over us to the present time you have had your person carefully and vigilantly guarded. This armed protection commenced in Nauvoo, continued during your journey hither, and has been continued ever since without any relaxation. This can be seen in the sentinel at your gate during the day, in the armed patrol upon your premises at night, and in the escort which ever attends you in your travels. All this costs valuable time and means. Allowing two dollars per diem in ordinary times for the last twenty-four years; and in the numerous times of excitement and imagined danger the increased expense of special patrols has been at least equal to the former, so that it is not unfair to say that you have cost the Mormons of this city fully two hundred thousand dollars to guard you in your own house! If this statement should appear extravagant to my brethren, they can make the calculation for themselves. Then, how do you pay those guards? Out of the tithing? By no means, except in certain cases. The onerous and exacting duty has mainly been performed by men obtained by requisition on the bishops. These brethren, having toiled all day for the support of themselves and families, have gone to your premises and stood guard all night, with not an enemy within a thousand miles of Salt Lake City. The time and tax upon the physical endurance of these guards were valuable and aggregate an enormous sum. Then the princely escort which never fails to accompany you in your frequent journeyings is ever quartered upon the people, and this has cost us, first and last, time included, not less than two hundred thousand dollars. That I consider a very moderate estimate. You can not better spend a day or two than in making the calculation for yourself. The cost, then, of guarding your person in Utah, has been fully four hundred thousand dollars in valuable time and hard-earned means, less than twenty thousand of which has been paid out of the tithing. I congratulate you, sir, that you are the only man in the United States, outside or inside of a county jail or a State's prison, that has cost the pockets, the time, the larders, the oat-bins, hay-stacks and chicken roosts of American citizens such a sum for such a purpose! And all entirely uncalled for, and without a reason or a necessity worthy of a moment's consideration. For I do not believe there has ever been a time during the entire period of your incumbency of the presidency of the church when you were in danger of being assassinated.

The causes of your taking such extraordinary precautions for your personal safety, lie in your Falstaffian nature -- your native cowardice, and the bloody spectres which haunt you as the unwelcome "teasers" of a guilty conscience. From the beginning you have been conscious of being a usurper and a traitor. It is clear and undeniable that the constitution of our church (the Book of Covenants) predicates the idea of "the succession" upon the well understood law of primogeniture, stating expressly, that it "was confirmed to be handed down from father to son," and that it should be in Joseph, "and in his seed through all their generations" you fully recognized this proposition in the earlier years of your presidency as applying to David Smith, because you knew the common sense of the people would not admit of too abrupt a departure from the text of the Book of Covenants, and the cherished traditions of the church, no man in Nauvoo, in 1844 knew better than yourself, who was the "hope and the expectation" of our unsuspecting faith; and you manifest that conviction to-day in your traitorous efforts to ostracise and repudiate the family of Joseph, and in your overwhelming ambition to fix the next ensuing succession in your son, Brigham Young, Jr. It was this consciousness of perpetrating a wrong and a treason upon the children of Joseph, that excited your fears in Nauvoo, and continued to alarm you until you had educated the Mormon mind to believe you to be the "legal successor." How many thousands of times has the lying cant-phrase been repeated in our "testimony" meetings: "I know by the Spirit of God, that President Young is Joseph's legal successor!" The blockheads! They might with equal reason and truth have said, they knew you to be the legal successor of Benedict Arnold, and the uncle of Jeff. Davis! But leaving the idea of the rights of the Smith family out of the question (and I here disclaim all interest in and concern for those rights, and only refer to them to show how basely and completely you betrayed them, and to illustrate the perfidity that forms a constituent portion of your mental constitution), if the church was to be governed by some one in the "quorums," still there were several persons whose claims logocally and canonically preceeded yours; and besides, there was an entire council organization which, as a presiding council, held precedence over the traveling councillors (or twelve apostles) over which you presided. This was the High Council of the Church, our ecclesiastical court of last resort, whose president must be the president of the whole church, and over which Joseph had uniformily presided as such; while of your quorums the Book of Covenants says: "The twelve traveling councillors are called to be the twelve apostles, or special witnesses of the name of Christ, in all the world; thus differing from other officers of the church in the duties of their calling."

But you had formed a ring composed of Heber C. Kimball, Williard Richards and others of nearly equal note, and by their aid succeeded in your attempt at usurpation of the Presidency of the Church. Like traitors sometimes do, you "flourished like the green bay tree." The cup of your ambition seemed overflowing in its happy realizations; but the poison of fear and conscious guilt was there to mar and spoil its enjoyment. You feared your brethren whom you had cheated and suplanted, and your fraudulently won honors rest uneasily upon you. You feared that they would do unto you what you would certainly have done unto them had their case been yours. Hence body-guards to protect your person.

After you had removed to Salt Lake and domiciled your family within that semi-fortification and those comfortable houses, built of tithing materials and unrequited, conscripted labor, and had become firmly fixed on the throne of the "kingdom," you still kept up the useless watch, turning your office into a small armory, where the most approved patterns of fire-arms were kept ready for a moment's use. The reasons for all this were, first the original cause of fear which still remained; second, there might be husbands lurking around, whose wives you had corrupted and stolen, who might consider a moment of sweet revenge to be an equivalent for a life-time of wretchedness and misery in their once happy, but now desolate homes; third, you had introduced your doctrine of "blood atonement," and the friends of recusant Mormons, murdered in prosecution of it decrees, might take it into their heads to get even. And (with the exception of a few contemptable outsiders, who crawl around the horizon of your murky firmament, and, in the permitted distance, humble themselves in shameless abjectiveness before you, and lick dirt in the hope that "favor may follow fawning") your insensate fear of Gentiles who never yet have harmed you, and probably never will unlawfully; together with the latent yet ever-increasing fear and distrust of your own anointed brotherhood, caused by your insatiable avarice, your never-ending series of dishonest and treacherous dealings with them, and their increasing disregard for you. These are among the reasons why you keep yourself so secluded and carefully guarded, why you do not mix freely with the populace; why you did not celebrate the [natal] day of our country with the congregated masses of citizens in Salt Lake City; why you did not then and there occupy your wonted post of honor in the great Tabernacle; why you fled like the wicked who flee when no man pursueth, and with palpitating heart wore out your own "little old" Fourth of July as best you could! And, so, in the midst of pleasures, surrounded by obsequious flatterers and pliant flunkeys; in the midst of piles of wealth and multiplied outward evidences of grandeur; in the midst of your ambition and dreams of royalty and greatness, this constant fear of assassination is the imaginary sword which hangs over your head suspended by a single hair; it is the acid which sours and poisons your every cup of sweetness, and turns your simplest beverages into blood. Sir, how nobly you must have acted toward the offspring of Joseph; how guileless your heart; how great the "wisdom of your administration;" how thoroughly you have won and kept the confidence of your brethren, and of all just men, seeing that you have a chronic torment in the fear of being killed by somebody in the church or out!     ARGUS.


Notes: (forthcoming)

HISTORY  OF  MORMONISM.
_______

(Written expressly for the Corinne Reporter and containing a true
and succinct account of the Reign of Terror in Utah. -- Ed.)

From Nauvoo to Council Bluffs -- The Mormon Battalion -- Brigham's Treachery -- Bishops Stealing the Supplies --
Some Splendid Rascality -- Incidents from Missouri -- Stupendous Lying -- The Two Governors of Utah.

Salt Lake City, Oct. 5, 1871.    

                                                      An Open Letter to Brigham Young.

SIR: The hardships and privations endured by the Mormons in 1846 at Mt. Pisgah, and indeed all along the road from Nauvoo to Council Bluffs, probably exceeded in real suffering anything of the kind ever before experienced in the history of voluntary emigrations. The labors incident to traveling over new and unbroken roads; unwonted exposures to the elements, and the malarias of the ciuntry; and an insufficient supply of food; told with dreadful effect upon young and old; and the road could have been traced by the graves by its side. Your headquarters had advanced as far as the Bluffs, while the main body of the emigration lay in a helpless condition at Pisgah. Absolute starvation was only averted by the sending into the settled parts of Missouri and Iowa of hundreds of men to labor for food. Even with this aid famine was in our midst, bringing with it its ever accompanying plagues. Deadly fevers and scurvy were slaying scores daily, and, to all human appearance, Mormonism had found its last resting place. The sufferings and sorrows of those days can never be written, neither can they be fully comprehended, except by Him who knoweth all things. It was during this dark and dreadful period in Mormon history that the intelligence reached the Bluffs, that the United States had declared war against Mexico. Immediately the way and the means to save the people occurred to you; and, besides, it would enable you to use the General Government in aiding you, in part, to accomplish your great emigration scheme. You without delay made application to the War Department at Washington, tendering a battalion of troops to aid in the invasion of California, coupled with the request that said troops at the close of their term of service should be discharged in that country. That application, sir, was, and doubtless is on file at the War Office, to substantiate this statement. And, what is more, you preserved a copy of that paper; and in 186_, it was (unintentionally), seen, and was read by one who had employment in your office. You had inadvertently left your desk open. The Government accepted your proffer at once, and the Mormon battalion was immediately raised, and as soon as could be, started upon its war mission. You, of course, had arranged to draw the advanced money for the troops, and was acknowledged by the Department as their financial agent. With this money you, without delay, loaded a steamboat at St. Louis with provisions, clothing and medicines for the Mormons, which was delivered up the Missouri in due time and distributed among the people. By this means they were saved from perishing. All this is to your credit. Notwithstanding you got the Lion's share, and the bishops (your distributing agents) were accused of stealing in some instances, your [action] at this time, and in subsequent distributions unquestionably saved the people.

It would give me a very great satisfaction indeed to write of this commendable action of Brigham Young's, had not his vile nature and vaunting ambition utterly neutralized its virtues and turned its sweetness by making it into gall the occasion of an unpardonable fraud upon the people, which had for [a] base intention, the alienation of the affections of the Mormons from their country. Your tender of the battalion to the Government had been kept a secret from the Mormons, who would haardly have forgiven you for initiating a measure which was to draw from them what little of strength they had left, and leave them exposed to Indian raids. It was probably known only to Heber C. Kimball and Willard Richards, by whom it was also signed. When it is considered how fairly and honorable the Governmant had dealt with you in this matter; how readily your request had been granted; with what dispatch the means had been forwarded to you which had saved so many lives, and averted so much suffering; and how fully an unusual favor had been accorded you in guaranteeing the discharge of the battalion in California; (then a foreign State) it was to be supposed that you, in the presence of the congregation, would give the Government due credit for the same, and when you spoke of it at all, it would be only in its honor.

But, sir, you, not as the man Brigham Young, but in your public capacity as the chief priest of the Mormon sect, told us that the Governmnet of the United States had concocted a plan for our extermination! The plot was, to demand troops from the Mormons to aid in the war against Mexico. In our present wretched and helpless condition we would refuse compliance; and that refusal would be the Government's excuse for a Mormon war. Such, substantially, was the falsehood told with such apparent sincerity, and its credibility enforced with such earnest declamation, that it deceived everybody. Ot was received as true; and for years made a standing subject for public and private discourse, until it became so fully impressed upon the general mind, that Mormons even of American birth and education could look upon the United States only as an enemy and persecutor of the church, whose cold-blooded purpose had been to destroy us with the edge of the sword, and exterminate the whole Church from the face of the earth, regardless of law or humanity! This outrageous lie, told in the first place only as you can tell a lie, and for so long a time carefully nursed and kept alive by you, did more than any other thing to make the people of Utah hate the United States; to reconcile them to your monarchical projects; and to create within them the hope that you might succeed in the establishment of an independent government.

Ot is a long time since I became convinced that you were altogether unscrupulous in your affirmations when it suited your purpose so to be; but I was amazed to find that you could conceive and publish such an execrable falsehood against your country! There was to it a degree of baseness that defies comparison with the fiercest assaults upon private character. You may search the record of Jeff. Davis and other leaders of the late rebellion, and you will find nothing in their history that equals it in moral depravity and damnable meaness. The United States had never for one monent been derelict in duty to the Mormon people. In the rise of the Church, our preachers in the several States, suffered less criminal persecution by thirty percent, than did the first American Methodist preachers. And, after the Jackson county troubles in Missouri, when we made an appeal to the courts for a redress of the serious wrongs we had suffered from the violence of mobs, and petitioned the Government for a military force to protect us during the trial of our causes; President Jackson responded at once, affording us all necessary protection; and if we did not then and there get the remedy we sought for, it was not the fault of the Government. It was because the courts and people of that State were prejudiced against us; and that prejudice was due more than anything else to Mormon blockheads who could not hold their tongues about the negroes; and Missouri was a slave State. It is but the truth to say, that in all the Mormon troubles in that State, the Government of the United States was blameless. Unfortunately, Joseph had studied the Bible to the neglect of the constitution; and so in after years when the Church had settled in Illinois, he, by "revelation," went to Washington and laid our grievances before President Van Buren, who replied that, "our cause was just but he could do nothing for us." For that answer the Almighty was to curse the whole United States. Joseph should have known that the Mormon grievances, at that time were purely judicial questions, and that the Government could only afford protection to the courts, which it had already shown its readiness to do; and that President Van Buren's answer was altogether proper and right. But many in the church did not view the matter in that light, and were already feeling sore about it when Joseph was killed, and then when we, who were the proper parties, failed to make complaint against individuals concerned in his death, because the whole nation did not rise up and punish those murderers, you accused the country to consenting to his death and declared that his blood was required at the hands of the whole American people. For these reasons it can be readily understood that the Mormon mind was in a good condition to be impressed with the foul falsehood we have been discussing. It is not to be forgotten that at the breaking out of the Mexican war the people of the States, called upon to furnish soldiers, responded in overflowing numbers, and the Government had no occasion to call upon any church for men. The whole story of the demand for Mormon troops was a falsehood, concocted for the purpose of aiding you in your monarchist designs by its tendency to farther alienate the hearts of Mormons from their country.

Having disposed of your meanest lies, I can not close without a brief reference to your meanest one. When Governor Cumming assumed the duties of his office, the story of the Mountain Meadows was yet fresh in the minds of the people; the actors in that scene had not yet begun to scatter through the Territory, and were not yet lost in the multitudes, and the duty of the chief magistrate in the matter had not yet lost its impressiveness by the modifying influences of time. That massacre was uppermost in the mind of the new Governor, and he sought diligently to make its punishment the act of his administration. He, however, soon found that you were still the real Governor; that he was about the most useless individual there was in the land; and that even the arrest of the murderers of the Arkansas emigrants was out of his power. Still he determined not to give it up, and in his perplexity as to the best mode of proceedure he consulted "Argus." I told him that any one of those men could be arrested, but the force that could succeed in making the arrest would be insufficient to hold him, as the populace would undoubtedly come to the rescue, and, perhaps, make it "warm" for the officers. I told him there was but one way in which those men could be arrested and brought to trial, and that was, through your orders executed by Mormon officers. I advised him to go to you and get you to pledge your word that you would have Dame, Haight, Lee and Smith arrested and delivered into the proper custody; and assured him that if you so gave your word it would be done. I have thought of that many times since and wondered how it was possible for me to have been so "green." But I confess that I did think that if Brigham Young should pledge his word to a high public officer to do a certain thing, he would do it. Well, sir, His Excellency waited upon you at your office, and I had his word that you did so promise him. He was content, fully relying upon your honor. But as months passed by without any perceptible movement in that direction, he became uneasy and called upon you and refreshed your memory upon the subject. You renewed your promise and he left. Still, nothing was done. His term of office was now drawing to a close, yet no effort was made on your part to redeem your promise. He made you several calls; you putting him off with excuses until his term expired and he was about to leave Utah. Before he left he called upon you and told you to your face, and in your own office, that you had purposely lied to and deceived him. Now, sir, the corruption and faithlessness of Gentile officials is a favorite theme of yours. Yet I do not believe there is an officer in the service of the American Government so corrupt, so abandoned, so wanting in self-respect that would so shamelessly falsify his word pledged as yours was pledged, and so utterly repudiate his honor as you repudiated yours. You afterward made the flimsy excuse that those men "should not be tried before a Gentile Court." In this subterfuge you disregarded the fact that, except the first six days of their session, and by virtue of your own legislation in the premises, our Superior Courts were not Gentile Courts, in a proper sense, because, in criminal matters, they could have no business not furnished by Mormon grand juries; and could pass sentence upon no man not found guilty by a Mormon trial jury, which latter could find no verdict except for offences against our own Criminal Act, which, itself, was supposed to be based upon the common law, a compend of the legal wisdom of all the ages since the days of Moses, your model and great prototype. But, sir, the true reason why the President of the Mormon church shielded those men from arrest and trial can be seen and understood at a glance. He did not fulfill his promise to Governor Cumming, not because he was unable so to do, but because he dared not. Even with the juries at his command, and under his entire control by virtue of the Endowment House oath, he dared not take the risk of something leaking out during the trials that would reveal the dread secret that, after all, he himself was the murderous chief of the poor Arkansas emigrants!   ARGUS.


Notes: (forthcoming)

HISTORY  OF  MORMONISM.
_______

(Written expressly for the Corinne Reporter and containing a true
and succinct account of the Reign of Terror in Utah. -- Ed.)

Argus on the New Movement -- He Settles the Question of Morality --
Grant Comparisons and Fine Deductions.

An Open Letter to Wm. S. Godbe.

Salt Lake City, Oct. 12, 1871.    

SIR: I write you over a [nom] de plume, but pledge you my open name whenever you demand it, in confidence, after you have fully and finally withdrawn yourself from the Utah institution miscalled polygamy. I beg you to overlook my blunt and uncouth manner of writing -- it is my style. Permit me to assure you that what I have to say shall be said in all brotherly kindness, without malice, and with a sincere desire to further the understanding of the truth. In your address of July 30th, in speaking of the comparative virtue of the Mormon people, you fall into the same error that Brigham Young has fallen, and from which he deduces his pet argument in favor of his peculiar institution, namely, the comparing of Mormon harems with the brothels of the world, which you substantially do. In this you are certainly wrong; because, first, those brothels are not institutions of any church. Prostitution has existed in all ages, and, probably, always will. It is common to all countries; but finds its natural home in great commercial centers where there is a great preponderance of men, and among polygamous nations where it assumes a form not fit to be mentioned. Second, they are liable to contain, and do contain Mormon girls as well as others. Ot is, however, but just to remark that of the whole mass of these poor cast-a-ways, but very few indeed were brought up under a careful Christian guardianship. Third, there is no Christian church that recognizes whoredoms as an institution of that church, nor in any other sense, except as the most abominable and most to be abhorred of all the dark ways of sin. From this you can see at once the unfairness of comparing polygamy with the lowest and most degraded type of fallen humanity, represented only by outcasts from virtuous society, holding the same to be a part of Christian monagamy. Fairplay suggests that the comparison to be made, should be between the marriage system of the Mormon church and that of some other church. To illustrate, I would say like this: Is there a higher standard of morality and virtue in the polygamy of the church of Brigham Young, than in the monogamy of the Presbyterian church? Does the polygamy of Mormonism endure to peace, quiet, contentment, and affection in the family circle in a greater degree than the monogamy of Catholicism? Does the polygamy of Mormonism tend to a holiness of heart and a genuine, practical Christian life, in a greater degree than the monogamy of Methodism? These are the just comparisons to [be] made, and, when made, polygamy goes to the wall.

Among the reasons you gave why a man should not put away his polygamous (not polygamic) wives, was one which greatly surprised me; namely, on account of his children. Now, sir, to my mind, the greatest and most fatal objection that can be raised to the "twin relic" is, the bringing up of children in polygamous households, and, in my opinion, any man in Utah living with more than one "wife," who has "outgrown" his faith in Brigham Young and his doctrines, should not hesitate a day to put away his concubines for his childrens' sake, if for no other reason. I use the term concubine, not as implying an impure woman, but because it is, after all, the proper one to be used in this connection, for the reason that in a full and proper sense, no woman can be a wife that is not lawfully so, and the common law, as well as the statute, restricts the marriage relation to one wife. The idea of bringing up children under the influence of polygamy, in which they see so many things they should not see, and hear so much they should not hear, is the most immoralizing feature of the institution. Here is matter for "serious thought."

Your long and elaborate discourse was clearly an apology for polygamy. But it was an ideal polygamy; and not the institution as it exists to-day in Utah. You treat it with faultless respect. You speak of love and affection as existing between a Mormon and his wives. Have you not heard the high expounders of Mormonism, time and again, publicly instruct the women not to love their husbands, because love was jealous and could not bear a rival? Polygamy is fatal to woman's love. To the concubine it is hell; to the lawful wife, despair! And your fine words -- "full force of religious influence," -- "lofty enthusiasm," -- "true affection," -- "free from sensuality," -- lived in amity together," -- "feelings of confidence and love," -- "the tendrils of her feminine heart entwined around his," are the veriest twaddle, and unworthy of one who has so far "out-grown" polygamy, as, at least theoretically, to have discovered its failure as an institution worthy of being perpetuated. Look at the old polygamist families of Utah. Not one of them -- no sir, however much they may seek to keep their troubles to themselves, and however pleasant and good-natured they may appear in public and before strangers, not one that has not a little hell of its own sufficient to burn and destroy the last particle of conjugal love, had any existed. Scarcely one that has not a feud of greater or less malignancy existing between the woman, and also the children, who naturally sympathize and take sides with their mothers. These feuds stir up and keep alive angry passions, and render a truly pious frame of mind impossible. There is neither love nor prayer in Brigham Young's religion. Yet you, with a disingenuousness unexpected in Wm. S. Godbe, leave these plain facts in the back-ground, introduce your ideal "Celestial marriage," make it to represent the real, then give to it an undisguised sympathy, and treat it with the gravest and most respectful consideration!

It is a fact which can not be unknown to you, the polygamous wives in Utah are the hardest worked set of women in America. Even in polygamous Turkey, a man can not marry a second wife until he has endowed the first with property, in her own right, sufficient to support herself and her children. But here women have been sealed to men without regard to their ability to support either them or the lawful wife; and, what is more, the women have been both publicly and privately taught to labor for their own support, the support of their children, and for the support of their husband! There are men now loving in Salt Lake City and county who commenced life here by domiciling two or perhaps three women in a single room, who, by the united labors of the family, by the most pinching economy, and by the rise in the value of real estate are now in comfortable circumstances. If there be a hardship in breaking up olygamous households, it would be in such cases. Yet, as the romance (!) of "celestial marriage" has, with them, long since passed away, as they have never seen a day without strifes, discords or heart-burnings of some kind, as there is no prospect of domestic happiness in their present relations, where is the hardship in an honest man saying to those "spirituals;" Our family arrangements are unlawful; are not right anyway; I will support you and the children until you marry, which latter you are free to do; and if you marry, you can, if you choose, send my children to me, and I will support and educate them, or I will now deed you a certain property and give you the children, but for our mutual good the apparent relation of husband and wife can no longer exist between us. Thus by his voluntary effort he can do an act of justice to those women and their offspring which under other circumstances he may not be permitted to do. As an illustration, let us suppose that Mrs. Godbe should prefer, before the court, a charge of adultery against you, her husband, and pursue it to conviction and imprisonment. It would be a short way to a divorce with the estate and the children all hers. Then poor Hagar and Ishmael would be at the mercy of Sarah, with a bottle of water for an inherotance.

Grave duties sometimes require sacrifices. Yet a sacrifice to a requirement of right, and especially to a clear appreciation of duty gives pleasure rather than pain, because it propitiates and satisfies the conscience. In this connection I make bold to say that there is not a polygamist in Salt Lake City, who can think at all, but what realizes upon his conscience and within his heart that "celestial marriage" has been in principle a wrong unto himself, and in practice an unmitigated outrage upon his "wives." Then, as for the woman, by such voluntary act put away, do you think they would break their hearts about it? Not at all. Why, sir, if polygamy in Utah were put an end to to-day, and without any preparation, by the submission of the Mormons to the laws of Congress, while it would perhaps create an indifferent sort of pain in some instances, would give any amount of satisfaction to the deceived, enslaved, over-worked "spirituals," and would be, O what a triumph to a multitude of lawful wives (including your own) who have for years borne a burden of wretchedness impossible to describe! It is a waste of time to speculate upon how these extra women are to geta long without Abraham. The great majority of them have more than paid their way thus far, and, if need be, can still sustain themselves. I am aware that there are women in Utah who, in the presence of others, will deny my propositions, while in secret communion with their conscience will weep bitter tears in acknowledgement of their orrefragable truth. I know a most excellent lady, a "spiritual wife" of one of the high dignitaries of Brigham's church, who, on a certain occasion, manifested great zeal in defense of her position. I afterward asked her why she was so earnest in her remarks to that Gentile. (She knew my sentiments.) She replied: "How could I do otherwise when my honor was called in question?" Then added, as the tears started, "Yet something tells me all the time that I am not living right!" If you have any sympathy for those wretched women, so unfeelingly placed in a false position, express it for them as they now are, and waste no time in speculating as to what their future condition will be, because when freed from their present enslavement they will stand in little need of your sympathy.

I congratulate you that you have taken a position against the continued practice of polygamous sealings. I do so the more earnestly because it is the first practical step as yet taken against that abomination, and will prove to be the entering wedge that will burst the rotten log wide open. Yet, allow me to inquire, is it any more of a crime against woman, against morality, against the law for a man to take a concubine to-day than it was when the law against polygamy was first published? You certainly know that immediately after the promulgation of that law, Brigham Young took another concubine, and paraded her through the streets, took her to the parties, to the theater, through the Territory, and boasted of this open defiance of the law, and by his example created quite a revival in the sealing business. It became a common thing to see the lechers hasten with new victims to the sealing altar expressly (of they were to be believed) to show their contempt of the act of Congress. Now, why should not all such parties be held to the same account as those violating the law at the present time? There is more matter for "serious thought." Upon the whole, Mr. Godbe, it will be well to understand that in this entire matter, we are dealing not with questionable sentiments, but with an ugly fact, and that in this as well as in other matters, honesty os the best policy. It is clearly the duty of every polygamist in Utah, while he has the matter in his own hands, to at once and forever do away with his unlawful manner of living, making such provisions as may be ample or within his power for the support of those who must be put away.
                    Respectfully,                     ARGUS.


Notes: (forthcoming)

“ARGUS”  LETTERS.
_______

The Corinne Reporter has a contributor who signs himself "Argus," who for some months has occasionally discussed the Mormon question with a candor unusual, and a vim and force more effective than often displayed by either party on this exciting topic. This apostate Mormon, for such he evidently is, has given Brigham Young's dynasty some of the most telling blows it has ever received. -- Carson Register.

This ablest of all writers on Utah will shortly publish in book form, a history of Mormonism, which will be, in fact, the only genuine narrative on that subject.


Note 1: The only major book on Mormonism, to which Charles W. Wandell made any substantial contributions, was the 1873 volume by T. B. H. Stenhouse, Rocky Mountain Saints. See Chapter 43 of that notable history. However, some of the same material, derived from Wandell, was used in Fanny Stenhouse's 1874 companion volume, Tell It All.

Note 2: In 1873-74 Wandell wrote letters to Joseph Smith III, telling of his desire to publish his Mountain Meadows massacre writings in the form of a book. The RLDS leader was not particularly supportive of this proposition, and after Wandell's death his compilations were filed away in the RLDS archives and forgotten. All of this documentary material was later destroyed in a fire at Lamoni, Iowa.

ONE  OF  THE  PROPHET'S  ADMIRERS.
_______

The effusions of a Mormon sympathizer are admitted to the columns of the New York Tribune over the nom de plume of "Fair Dealing," which assume such an arregant positiveness that the reader is led to believe that all the fiends have conspired against that good and noble (God save the mark!) old polygamist and moribund ecclesiast, Prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-end Saints. But the American people are too well informed of the heinous crimes and offenses against the laws of the land by the Mormon leaders to allow such a bold advocate of sin and corruption to make an impression on their minds. Mormonism looks well enough with a sugar-coating, but strip it of its thin crust of deception and it stands out like a bold promontory of iniquity, so black that the night of Erebus would be turned into day beside it. If the writer alluded to ever enjoyed the conversation of United States Judges in Utah, as he asserts he did, he performed the duty of a spy in the interests of his master, Brigham Young. He lies when he says the present proceedings are instigated against Brigham Young and his disciples through prejudice and bigotry; he lies when he says the Mormon leaders have been peaceable and friendly to those not of their faith; he lies when he says the Mormons lolerate no dramshops and no houses of ill-fame; he lies when he says the Gentiles have come hither to root out the Mormons, to put down competition in business; he lies when he says religious prejudice, bigotry and persecution are wrongfully brought against them to mislead the people of the East; he lies most damnably when he asserts that Brigham Young. Jr.'s speech before the last Mormon Conference was not incendiary, and he makes an egregious ass of himself by intimating that President Grant has [given] the motive power to the present judicial proceedings in Utah for the purpose of [gaining] additional laurels to advance his interests in the next Presidential campaign. While nothing is probably further from the President's purpose, he will certainly endear himself still more in the hearts of the American people by encouraging the execution of the laws so that the greatest criminals of the age may be brought to justice. It will not benefit Brigham Young one iota for his emissaries to seek to turn the current public opinion. The fiat of Christianity has gone forth, and polygamy must be exterminated, no matter whether the streets of Salt Lake City be bathed in the blood of its defenders, and their opponents alike, or otherwise.

---

Notes: (forthcoming)

Telegraphic...
_______

A Miners' League to Punish
Mormon Criminals...
_______

Salt Lake City, April 14.    

...The miners on Star, Lincoln, and other districts in the southern part of the Territory, are forming a secret organization to oppose the secret influence of the Mormon endowment house, and among other objects, to bring to justice the instigators and perpetrators of the Mountain Meadow Massacre. Already over two hundred members are in the league....


Note: Edward W. Tullidge, in his 1886 History of Salt Lake City, says on page 590: "Sometime after this (the 1870 founding of the Salt Lake Tribune), a secret society was organized in the city and mining camps, known as the 'Gentile League of Utah.' Its mission was to break up 'Mormon Theocracy,' made so famous by McKean's extraordinary official statement, that it was on trial in his court, in the person of Brigham Young." Andrew Jensen, in the 2nd ed. of his Church Chronology, dates the founding of the Gentile League of Utah to the year 1872 -- and by April 15th (the date the Engelbrecht decision was overturned, leading to Brigham Young's freedom from prosecution for murder), the G.L.U. numbered "over two hundred members." See also the comments attached to the Salt Lake Tribune for Apr. 16, 1872.

REMINISCENCE  OF  BEADLE.
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From the interview between the reporter of the New York Times and J. H. Beadle, we clip the following little unpleasantness which occurred at our county seat a few years ago:

Mr. B. -- Take the town of Corinne for instance. There a community of one thousand Americans sprang up on the railroad and their Judge, in 1869, was Bishop Smith of Boxelder, a hoary-headed old sinner with six wives, two of whom were his cousins and two his nieces -- his own brother's daughters! -- Think of that -- an English Mormon Bishop the absolute Judge of the life, liberty, marriage relations, and probate matters of a thousand Americans! Wasn't that a nice outfit?

Reporter -- And do you personally know this to be a fact?

Mr. B. -- I do indeed, sir. I was summoned on a civil suit before this lecherous old "Saint," Smith in November, 1869. When coming out of the Court House I was hit suddenly and without warning in the back of the head by somebody, I know not who, and knocked senseless. They then trampled on me with their heavy boots till I had bones broken and was subjugated generally. My friends hauled me home, the doctor set me on my pins in a month or so, and that was the end of it. The "Saints" had all that fun, and it never cost them a cent. Suppose I had brought suit for damages. I should have had a Mormon Judge and jury, and you can guess would have been the result. I had "damages" enough already! In those days we were almost without resource, except the right of appeal to the District Court. Now make Utah a Mormon State, and that old polygamist will have ten times the power he had before; for then we could not appeal to a Gentile Judge, but only to a Mormon Supreme Court governed by the priesthood.

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GOOD  RAILROAD  NEWS.
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Location and Survey of the Portland,
Dalles and Salt Lake Railroad.

The following dispatch was received here to-day from Colonel Chapman, President of the above named railroad company, who passed through our city last evening, but in too great haste to stop over:

Kelton, April 25, 1872.          

O. J. Hollister, O. D. Cass, Dennis J. Toohy, Corinne: -- We shall proceed immediately to the survey and location of the Portland, Dalles and Salt Lake Railroad. I have not the opportunity to confer with your people now, owing to important engagements respecting our road at Portland that do not admit of delay.

W. W. CHAPMAN.                 
Prest., O. D. & S. L. R. R. Co.                 

It has already been decided, we understand, that the eastern terminus of this new line is fixed at Corinne. This, with the Utah, Idaho and Montana railroad to Helena and the Northern Pacific, will be glory enough for one year.


Notes: (forthcoming)

Telegraphic...
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NEW YORK.
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New York, Sept. 14. -- The fact that the Mountain Meadow Massacre was Mormon work, is fully confessed in an affidavit of Philip Klingen Smith, now of Lincoln county, Nevada. Smith says [he], at the time a Mormon bishop, at Cedar City, Utah, was forced to muster with a militia regiment, perpetrating the crime, that the assailed party, after four days fight, were induced to lay down their arms under promise of protection, after which all were shot down by the Mormon militia, except seventeen young children who were taken in charge by Smith and saved. The affidavit gives particulars and carries conviction to its truth.


Note: The first national news of the 1871 Klingensmith affidavit came in the form of a short Associated Press release, "leaked" by James W. Simonton and dated "Salt Lake City, September 4th," which merely said: "New and exciting testimony has been obtained with regard to the memorable Mountain Meadow massacre. The documents will be sent to the Department of Justice at Washington..." Simonton and other people in Utah and Nevada had been aware of the affidavit for months -- it had even been forwarded to national government authorities in Washington, D. C., prior to Simonton's announcement, but the Grant administration had not acted upon the development. Other AP telegraphic bulletins from Simonton in Salt Lake City followed, including one dated Sept. 13th, which reported: "An affidavit by one of the least guilty among the participants in the affair, showing conclusively that the terrible Mountain Meadow massacre was the act of the Mormon authorities, has been made here... the deponent is Phillip Smith, who was at the time of the massacre the Mormon Bishop of Cedar City..." Both the New York Times and the New York Herald published the entire Klingensmith affidavit in their issues of Sept. 14th, but a rival paper, the New York Tribune appears to have scooped them by printing a reference to the confession on Sept. 11th. Strangely enough, although the news report originated in Salt Lake City, that city's Tribune did not reference Klingensmith's statement until Sept. 23rd.

THE  MORMON  PRESS
ON  MOUNTAIN  MEADOWS.
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Whenever a Mormon falls from grace, which means a denial of the royal authority of Brigham Young, that moment the recusant is cut off, root and branch, as an apostate fore-ordained from the beginning to eternal perdition no less than mortal disgrace. To refuse to pay tithing into the coffers of ecclesiastical piracy is the unpardonable sun: far more so than to dispute the sangunary decrees of Blood Atonement. Depleting the treasures of the Church by contumacy in not pouring in the annual tenth of a man's net profits, sends out the anathemas of Zion; but when, occasionally, the dupe whose hands are gory in innocent blood shed by "divine" orders, repents his dreadful career by wholesome confession, then do all the curses of Danite theology find condemning speech to crush the penitent in his remorse, lest revelations of too worldly a character throw dangerous light on the dread secrets of Latter Dayism. Hence we find the Salt Lake Herald -- the Janus-faced organ of the Church -- in yesterday's issue making use of its choicest style of hypocrisy. The man Smith, who went into the slaughter at Mountain Meadow, was a priest of God, obedient to "counsel" when that crime of the century was perpetrated at the command of his then chief; but behold now the sanctimonious elder attempts to impeach the witness whose testimony comes up from the vale of murder! The Herald assumes a desire to bring Smith to Utah, in order that his declaration may be put to the test of corroborative evidence, so that "the Mormons, as a people," may not be charged with the crime. This is shallow. The Mormons, as a people, are not charged with the unparallelled massacre, but the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, as impersonated by Brigham Young, and his Apostles, did through them make the sacrifice of more than one hundred and twenty human lives, showing no mercy to its victims. The witnesses are hurrying in, of whom Smith is one, but, as many of those will soon appear; we shall now quote the Herald's comments which may be stereotyped for use in the cases of all others who are to follow, seeking amnesty from God and man, under the plea of "Guilty."

"Simonton, chief of the associated press bureau in New York, sends a telegram west over his own signature, charging the Mormon people with the Mountain Meadow massacre, on the alleged confession of one Smith, now in Lincoln county, Nevada. This Smith, by Simonton's showing, is either a murderer or a perjured scoundrel, and in either case is amenable to the laws. He should be promptly arrested and brought to Utah on a requisition from Governor Woods to Governor Bradley, and if his statements could be substantiated by any credible testimony the guilty should be punished. But, the attempt made to charge the crime upon the Mormons, as a people, is an infamy only less in magnitude than the massacre itself. It has suited the malevolent policy of a few bitter anti-Mormons to refuse to avail themselves of every opportunity to fully investigate this matter, and continue to make general charges, which it seems they have at last got a second Bill Hickman to make affidavit to."


Notes: (forthcoming)

MOUNTAIN  MEADOWS  MASSACRE.
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We give below the affidavit of Philip KlingonSmith one of the bishops who obeyed the orders of Brigham in the butchery of Mountain Meadows. The fearful story requires no comment, nor does it admit of a doubt.

State of Nevada, County of Lincoln ss:

Personally appeared before me, Peter B. Miller, Clerk of Court of the Seventh Judicial District of the State of Nevada, Philip Klingon Smith, who being duly sworn, on his oath says:   My name is Philip Klingon Smith; I reside in the county of Lincoln, in the State of Nevada; I resided at Cedar City in the County of Iron, in the Territory of Utah, from A.D. 1852 to A.D. 1859; I was residing at said Cedar City at the time of the massacre at Mountain Meadows, in said Territory of Utah; I had heard that a company of emigrants was on its way from Salt Lake City, bound for California; after said company had left Cedar City, the militia was called out for the purpose of committing acts of hostility against them; said call was a regular military call from the superior officers to the subordinate officers and privates of the regiment at Cedar City and vicinity, composing a part of the militia of the Territory of Utah; I do not recollect the number of the regiment. I was at that time the Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at Cedar City; Isaac C. Haight was President over said church at Cedar City and the southern settlements in said Territory; my position as Bishop was subordinate to that of said President. W. H. Dame was the President of said Church at Parowan, in said Iron County. said Dame was also colonel of said regiment; said Isaac C. Haight was lieutenant-colonel of said regiment, and said John D. Lee, of Harmony in said Iron County, was Major. Said regiment was duly ordered to muster, armed and equipped as the law directs, and prepared for field operations. I had no command nor office in said regiment on the expedition which resulted in said company's being massacred in the Mountain Meadows, in said County of Iron. About four days after said company of emigrants had left Cedar City, that portion of said regiment then mustered at Cedar City took up its line of march in pursuit of them. About two days after said company had left Cedar City, Lieutenant-Colonel I. C. Haight expressed in my presence a desire that said company might be permitted to pass on their way in peace; but afterward he told me that he had orders to kill all of said company of emigrants except the little children. I do not know whether said headquarters meant the [regional] headquarters at Parowan or the headquarters of the Commander-in-chief at Salt Lake City. When the said company had got to Iron Creek, about twenty miles from Cedar City, Captain Joel White started for Pinto Creek Settlement, through which the said company would pass for the purpose of influencing the people to permit said company to pass on their way in peace. I asked and obtained permission of said White to go with him and aid him in trying to save life. When we got about three miles from Cedar City, we met Major J. D. Lee, who asked us where we were going. I replied that we were going to try to prevent the killing of the emigrants, Lee replied, "I have something to say about that." Lee was at that time on his way to Parowan, the headquarters of Colonel Dame. Said White and I went to Pinto Creek; remained there one night, and the next day returned to Cedar City, meeting said company of emigrants at Iron Creek. Before reaching Cedar City we met one Ira Allen, who told us that "The decree had passed devoting said company to destruction." After the fight had been going on for three or four days a messenge[r] from Major Lee reached Cedar City, who stated that the fight had not been altogether successful, upon which Lieutenant-Colonel Haight ordered out a reinforcement. At this time I was ordered out by Captain John M. Higby who ordered me to muster, "armed and equipped as the law directs." It was a matter of life or death to me to muster or not, and I mustered with the reinforcing troops. It was at this time that Lieutenant-Colonel Haight said to me that it was the orders from headquarters that all but the little children of said company were to be killed. Said Haight had at that time just returned from headquarters at Parowan, where a military council had been held. There had been a like council held at Parowan previous to that, at which were present Colonel Dame, Lieutenant-Colonel I. C. Haight and Major John D. Lee. The result of this first council was the calling out of said regiment for the purpose already stated. The reinforcement aforesaid was marched to the Mountain Meadows, and there formed a junction with the main body. Major Lee massed all the troops at a spring and made a speech to them, saying that his orders from "headquarters were to kill the entire company except the small children." I was not in the ranks at that time, but on the side talking to a man named Slade, and could not have seen a paper in Major Lee's hands. Said Lee then sent a flag of truce into the emigrant camp, offering said emigrants that "if they lay down their arms, he would protect them." They accordingly laid down their arms, came out from their camp, and delivered themselves to said Lee. The women and children were then, by the order of said Lee, separated from the men and were marched ahead of the men. After the said emigrants had marched about a half mile toward Cedar City the order was given to shoot them down. At that time said Lee was at the head of the column. I was in the rear. I did not hear Lee give the order to fire, but heard it from the under officers as it was passed down the column. The emigrants were then and there shot down, except seventeen little children, which I immediately took into my charge. I do not know the total number of said company as I did not stop to count the dead. I immediately put the little children in baggage wagons belonging to the regiment and took them to Hamlin's ranch, and from there to Cedar City, and procured them homes among the people; J. Willis and S. Murdy assisted me in taking charge of said children. On the evening of the massacre W. H. Dame and Lieut. I. C. Haight came to Hamblin's, where I had said children, and fell into a dispute, in the course of which said Haight told Colonel Dame, that, if he was going to report of the killing of said emigrants he should not have ordered it done. I do not know when or where said troops were disbanded. About two weeks after said massacre occurred said Major Lee (who was also an Indian agent) went to Salt Lake City and, as I believe, reported said fight and its results to the commander-in-chief: I was not present at either of the before-mentioned councils, nor at any council connected with the aforesaid military operations or with said company. I gave no orders except to those connected with the saving of the children, and those, after the massacre had occurred, and said orders were given as bishop and not in a military sense. At the time of the firing of the first volley I discharged my piece. I did not fire afterwards, though several subsequent volleys were fired. After the first fire we delivered I at once set about saving the children. I commenced to gather up the children before the firing had ceased. I have made the foregoing statements before the above-entitled Court for the reason that I believe that I would be assassinated should I attempt to make the same before any court in the Territory of Utah. After said Lee returned from Salt Lake City, as aforesaid, said Lee told me that he had reported fully to the President, meaning the commander-in-chief, the fight at Mountain Meadows and the killing of said emigrants. Brigham Young was at that time the commander-in-chief of the militia of the Territory of Utah; and further deponent saith not.

(Signed) PHILIP KLINGON SMITH.

Subscribed and sworn to before me this 10th day of April A.D. 1871.

(Copy of Seal -- District Court, Seventh Judicial District, Lincoln County, Nevada.)

Note 1: Although two Justices of the Utah Territorial Supreme Court certified Mr. Klingensmith's statement, the text published by the Corinne Daily Reporter appears to have dropped out a few lines and words, here and there, (none of which changes the explicit import of his testimony).

Note 2: The Reporter reprinted this same statement in its issue of Sept. 24th.

“MURDER  MOST  FOUL”
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If we may believe the sworn affidavit of a Mormon who claims to have participated in the Mountain Meadows massacre, says the New York "Tribune" of the 11th instant, the well settled suspicion that that dreadful deed was the work of the Mormons is now an established fact. Bishop Philip K. Smith of the Mormon Church swears that the immigrants slain at Mountain Meadows were not killed by Indians, as reported by the Mormons, but by the Mormon militia, who were called out for that purpose. His affidavit which we publish to-day, explicitly details the particulars of this frightful affair, all of which he saw while he was in the ranks. Few people familiar with the history of those times have ever doubted that the Mormons were guilty of that massacre; and the testimony of Bishop Smith confirms the belief of those who long ago set up on the bloody spot where the immigrants perished a monument bearing the significant legend -- "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord."

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HOW  THEY  GET  NEWS."
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Two dollars and fifty cents offered to-day for a copy of the New York Herald containing the expose of the Mountain Meadows massacre. The excitement among the classes is great. -- (Salt Lake Mining Journal 21st.)

A very good puff, Oscar, for the Ujijiji organ, but for the New York "Herald" you must surely have intended the Corinne Reporter, the first and only paper in Utah to publish the terrible story. We produced it last Friday, and at 10 A.M. next day two hundred copies were distributed to the people of Salt Lake City. That's how we do things on the Bear.

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PROBABLY? -- A press dispatch from Salt Lake City says that "from two and a half to five dollars was offered for single copies of the New York papers containing the expose of the Mountain Meadow massacre," on Saturday. This is a sharp fling at the morning papers of Salt Lake which should have reproduced the evidence from eastern journals received the previous evening. It is rumored that Smith's affidavit will be published this Fall. In that city.


Note: Actually, the Salt Lake Tribune published the Klingensmith statement that very day (in its issue for Sept. 23, 1872).

MOUNTAIN  MEADOWS  MASSACRE.
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We give below the affidavit of Philip Klingon Smith one of the bishops who obeyed the orders of Brigham in the butchery of Mountain Meadows. The fearful story requires no comment, nor does it admit of a doubt...

(see issue of Sept. 20th for the text)

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BY REQUEST. -- In order to accomodate a large number of persons desiring the story of Mountain Meadows, as given by Bishop Smith, we republish that document to-day. It will be found on the first page of the Reporter. In wrapper, ready for mailing, ten cents per copy. Send it everywhere. No such missionary ever yet went out from Utah.


Notes: (forthcoming)

Telegraphic...
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SALT LAKE CITY.
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A correspondent of the Pioche Record endorses Philip K. Smith being formerly bishop of the Mormon Church, and says he is ready to return to Utah and give testimony in person relative to the Mountain Meadow atrocity.


Notes: (forthcoming)

JOTTINGS ABOUT TOWN.
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The event of the week is the coming lecture of "Argus" on the awful tragedy of Mountain Meadows....

"ARGUS" LECTURING -- The celebrated writer on Utah history is announced to lecrure in this city to-morrow evening. See the advertisement pf "Argus" on Mountain Meadow, and be prepared to listen to a narrative such as finds no equal in the annals of cruelty and woe.

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PERSONAL.
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Colonel C. W. Wandell, of Pioche, Nevada, arrived here to-day from the West.

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SYNOPSIS.

Part I. In the Fall of 1857, the lecturer left San Francisco for Salt Lake, via the Mountain Meadows -- Startling rumors of the massacre -- the armed sentinel at the Cajon Canyon -- Excitement at Fort [Tojon] and at San Bernardino -- The desert road -- The ruins of the emigrants fort -- The fatal waters -- The scene of the massacre -- The skulls and hair -- The vow.

Part II. The arrival of the emigrants in Utah -- They are ordered to break camp and leave -- Their pitiable condition -- Hostilities neagative and positive -- The mission of the Governor's Aid-de-camp -- The council of war -- The Militia called out -- the siege -- The treacherous flag of truce -- The emigrants surrender -- The massacre -- The apostrophe -- O! ye slaughtered ones!

Part III. The closing atrocities of the massacre -- The emigrant children -- The spoils -- Meeting of Governor Young and the chief demon of the massacre -- Who was responsible? -- The present whereabouts of the Murderers -- Incidents -- Conclusion.

Notes: (forthcoming)

MOUNTAIN MEADOW. -- When it is known that "Argus" is to speak at the Opera House on the subject of the Mountain Meadow Massacre, that is enough to fill the house with auditors. To-night is the time to listen to the story of the Blood Atonement. Go and hear "Argus."

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Judge Wandell's lecture on Sunday evening, on the massacre at the Mountain Meadows, was worthy of a larger attendance than it received. It abounded in pathetic passages, and was a succinct and authentic account of that terrible wholesale slaughter of innocent men, women and children. The Judge goes hence to Corinne, Utah, this evening. His genial manners and earnest conservation have attracted many, who have acquired the pleasure of his acquaintance, and wish him a prosperous journey and better success.

We clip the above notice from the "Sentinel," of Eureka, and have no hesitancy in coinciding with it, having known Judge Wandell for several years, and as a writer and a lecturer we take pleasure in recommending him to our citizens and hope to see them turn out and give him a rousing house this evening at half past seven o'clock in the Opera House.


Notes: (forthcoming)

ED. REPORTER -- Permit me through the columns of your paper, to assure the Salt Lake "Herald" man, that in my lecture last night in Corinne, I did "touch the meat question" -- the most slaughtered at the Mountain Meadows by the butchers of Brigham Young, the governor of Utah.   C. W. Wandell.

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Judge Wandell's very interesting lecture upon the subject of the Mountain Meadows Massacre will be repeated to-night at the Opera House. It commences at eight o'clock and is free to all.


Notes: (forthcoming)